I love the new spiral snakeskin tube in PSP8. When I first discovered it, I had lots of fun just playing with it, watching it rotate around as I dragged it across the screen, looking very snake-like, so I thought why not do the obvious? So, here's the product of my playing around - Jake the Snake. Jake's a pretty cool snake; I'm not sure exactly what type of snake he is, a python maybe? I'll leave that one up to you, he can be anything you want. My favourite snake was the giant boa constrictor from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. What a cool reptile he was.....even thanking Harry for accidentally releasing him....much to Harry's relief! :-). Ssssssssso, I hope you enjoy thisssssss tut.
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First of all, you'll need to download Jake's eye. Put it aside somewhere safe until we're ready to use it.
1. Open a new image with a white background 400 x 400 (I like to work big, then scale down....and no, 'scale' is not meant to be a pun ;-). Now create a new layer and name it it 'Jake'. (To create a new layer, first of all make sure your layer palette is showing, View>Palettes>Layers, and then left-click on the new layer icon in the top-left hand corner of the window as shown below). Now make another new layer, and call it 'head' - keep on creating new layers and naming them as I've done (see below).
There should be 6 layers altogether, including the Background:
1. Background; 2. Jake; 3. Head;
4. Eye1; 5. Eye2; 6. Tongue;
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2. Go back to the 'Jake' layer. Open the tube tool, and select the snakeskin tube (as shown below).
 Where you'll find the tube tool |
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 The new spiral snakeskin tube |
3. Leave the tube at the default settings (Scale: 100%, Step: 2, Placement: Random, Selection: Incremental), and then drag it down from the top right-hand corner edge of the image, across back and forth as I've done to get a continuous, snakey shape (as I've done, below). Try not to leave any gap between the edge of the image and where you start dragging from. Don't worry if you don't get it looking exactly like mine, and take as many 'trial runs' as you like before you get what you're happy with. Isn't the undo button wonderful?? ;-)
4. O.k. let's leave Jake where he is for the time being (what there is of him so far, that is :) and start on his head. Open a new image, 100 x 120 with a transparent background. Go to the selection tool, and choose octogon on the Selection Type drop-down menu. Keeping an eye on the x and y co-ordinates on the bottom-right hand corner of the PSP interface, start your octogon at around 14 x 14, and slowly drag it out to around 79 x 111 (see example, below left). Don't worry if you don't match those exact co-ordinates, just approximately will do, as long as you roughly have what I have that will do fine (below, right).
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