Blade Pro Sidebars

Blade Pro is a wonderful plugin for creating text effects, but ithas a number of other uses as well. The bevelling capability of the programmakes it incredibly useful for creating sidebar backgrounds. To begin,open a new file, about 200 x 100 pixels, 16 million colors with a whitebackground. Now pick your favorite BladePro preset and apply it to therectangle. Presets with nice clear bevels and not too much texture workbest. You should get a button similar to ones shown below. These were madewith some of the presets available at other sites. Some very nice effectscan be found at TheCheroke's Homepage,

and at NewDawn Graphics.

Now, using your Shape Select tool again, choose a thin rectanglethat includes the right hand bevel and some of the interior. Go to theEdit Menu and select Copy.

In the Edit Menu, Paste your selection as a New Image. This is thebeginning of our sidebar background, but first we need to make it muchlarger. Go to Image: Canvas Size. Make the new width at least 1000 pixels,and keep the new height the same as the old. Be sure that the boxes marked"Center Image Horizontally" and "Center Image Vertically" are unchecked.When you are done you should get a long thin window, with your image onthe left, and an empty area on the right, which PSP 5 shows with a checkerboardpattern.

Now using the Flood Fill tool, fill in the rest of the backgroundwith color. Here I've used white.

Next we need to add a drop shadow to make the border stand out more.Using the magic wand, select the colored area to the right. Now go to Selections:Invert. Your sidebar pattern should now be selected. Go to Image, Effects:Drop Shadow. Set the Vertical Offset to 0, the Horizontal Offset to 5,the shadow Color to black, the opacity to 100 and the blur to 10.This givesa nice drop shadow, but unfortunately PSP has a nasty to leave the topand bottom edges of the shadows incomplete.

To fix the shadows, zoom in with the magnifying glass and with theShapeSelect tool, choose a central part of the shadow. Go to Edit:Copy, andthen Edit: Paste as a New Selection. Complete the drop shadow at the topand bottom of the window.

The final product should tile seamlessly on a webpage. If you wouldlike a little more texture to your sidebar, that can also be easily done.load an appealing texture into PSP. Go to Image: Resize. Be sure that "Maintain Aspect Ratio" is unchecked. set the Width to the textures' originalwidth, and the Height to the same height as the sidebar file. Edit:Copy.

In your sidebar graphic, go to the Layers menu and create a new layer.Then paste your texture onto the left side of the sidebar.

Finally, in the Layers menu, choose Properties. Set the Blend Modeto Luminosity, or whichever blend mode gives an effect that you like.

Blade Pro presets that have alot of texture can also be used to createsidebars, but the method is a bit different. First apply the preset toyour 200 x 100 pixel file and again copy a section including the righthand bevel, as described above. Below is a button I created with my AlienArtifact preset.

Open another file, about 300x300 pixels. Paste your selection inthe center, and then paste it a second time. This time go to Image: Flip.You should then be able to fit your two selection together. Using the ShapeSelect tool, draw a rectangle around your graphic and copy it.

Make sure that your background color is set to white, and then Pastethe graphic as a Transparent Selection. Again Edit:Copy, and the Edit,Paste: As a new Image. This should give you the sidebar for your background.Expand the canvas size and add the drop shadow as described above.

If you would like to see some of the sidebars created with this techniquetiled on a page, click on the following links.

Basic Picture Frame	Purple	Gold	Blue
Alien	Textured Gold	Textured Blue	Blue Crackle

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Tutorials for PSP 4, 5, 6, and 7 as well as presets and tutorials for the BladePro plugin.