Open a new file, 400 pixels wide by 150 high, 16 million colors,with a white background. Select Black as your foreground color and addsome text. Use a nice solid looking font. Here I've used Arial Black, 72point.
Deselect the lettering by pressing [Ctrl] D, and choose the retouchingtool (the little pointing finger.) Set it to Smudge, Size = 4, the brushshape to round, the Opacity to 50, Density to 100, Step to 1, Hardnessto 50, and the paper texture to None. If you are using PSP 6, be sure thatthe Build-up Brush box is checked. Make icicles on your text by strokingdownwards with the brush. Be sure to roughen all the edges, and try tosmudge some of the white color inside of the letters. When you're done,it should look something like this:
Go to colors and select negative image. This will make the textwhite, and the background black.
Now we need to get the text selected for further work. Choose theSelect tool (the magic wand) and click on the black background. A Tolerancesetting of 35 works well. To completely select all the black, holddown the shift key and click on any inside areas in the letters (such asin the e and the o). While we have the background selected, we'll changeit to some neutral color, such as brown. This will later be the transparentcolor in our GIF. Now go to Selections, and choose Invert. The text shouldnow be the highlighted area.
Change the foreground color to white, and apply a hotwax coating(Image, Other: Hotwax). You should get something like this:
To highlight the icicles, we use the Metal Effects filter from Greg'sFactory Output, Vol II. If you don't have Greg's Filters, you can downloadthem from my main page. Slide the wave scale to 255, and leave the othercontrols alone.
This looks pretty good, but it needs a little color. Go to the Colorsmenu, adjust, red/green/blue. Set the blue to 20 % and the others to 0.For more color, slight the blue up higher. To finish, set the backgroundcolor to your neutral color (brown here) and save as a transparent GIF.
