Creating a Curtain Background Border Tile in PSP8 - Page 2

5.  Your materials palette should now look something like what I have (left).

6.   Choose the fill tool (paint bucket icon) and right-click inside your image to fill your image up with the blue background fill. Immediately after you do that, left-click over your image to fill it with your foreground pattern. Voila.....our curtain is born! Well, almost........

7.   We need to chop just a little bit off the right-hand side, otherwise this will be the result. Yuck! It looks as if our dressmaker forgot to hem that edge! Oh well, looks like we'll have to do it for her ;-) Select the crop tool. As soon as you select it you may see a long thin red line appear on your image. That's the new-look selection area for this tool. You can resize this by clicking on those little node-looking boxes and dragging with your mouse, or better still just key in the co-ordinates straight into the tool ribbon as I did below (see the 'Right' and 'Bottom' co-ordinates). Change yours to match what you see here, and click on the tick mark (the OK button) when you've finished:

8.    Now go to Image>Add borders. (If you get the Auto-Actions pop-up, just click OK). If you haven't used it before in V8, you'll find the Add Borders dialogue is verrrry different to V7 and previous versions, but it's very straightforward once you get the hang of it. First of all, we need to change the colour. Right-click on the coloured box and enter these settings: R:138, G:138, B190 or HTML: #G138B198. Now we need to change the size to Top:0, Left:0, Right:1200, Bottom:0. Hit OK.

Tip: whenever you make a background border tile such as this one, always make sure it will be wide enough to cater for bigger resolutions, otherwise your border will repeat across the page.

VOILA! Our curtain bordered background is now finished. Want to compare it to the one I showed you above? Check this out .....ah, much better huh?

Don't like the colour? Well....you can always take the 'easy' way out, and colorize it: Adjust>Hue & Saturation>Colorize. But, if you really want to get to know the materials palette inside out, why not go back and start from scratch? See what other interesting combinations you can come up with by playing around with different colours, patterns, textures, gradients, etc. Just remember the most important thing: have fun! :)