Shimmering Pearl Tutorial for PSP 7

This tutorial shows you a very quick and easy method for making a pearl, so it should be quite suitable for beginners. In fact, I'm a beginner too in a way, because this is my very first tutorial! Soooo, if there is anything about it you don't understand, or something I haven't made as clear as you think I should have, please don't hesitate to email me with any questions. Unfortunately it can only be done in PSP7 and above, as it utilises the illumination effect that doesn't appear until version 7.0. I've seen a lot of other tutorials on making pearls, but once you get the hang of it, this is one of the fastest and easiest methods, and gives pretty good results too. So without further ado . . .

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1.    Open a new image, 150 x 150, with the same settings as on the right:

    2.    Left-click on the foreground color box above the color palette (as shown above). When the colour wheel appears, go to where it says 'HTML code' and delete the current setting, replacing it with: #EFAFEA (see right). Click 'OK'. This will give you a sort of dusky pink.

3.    Now click on the background colour on the palette, and using the same method as above, change the existing background colour to a dark blue. (I used #4A00A5 . . . see below). Click 'OK'.

4.    We're ready to start our pearl. Go to the selection tool, and choose the circle option, as shown in my settings on the left.

5.    Now comes the trickiest part of this tut. To get our pearl perfectly centered in our image, we need to start creating the circle from the exact middle of the image. Run your mouse over the centre of your image. As you're doing that, keep a close eye on the number settings in the bottom-left hand corner of the PSP screen. These numbers tell you exactly where you are in the image. It's important for us to know this if we want our image to have a perfectly centered pearl. When you've reached the exact centre, the reading should be 75,75 (see below).

6.     Left-click and drag the circle slowly out towards the edge of the image. Keep going until you get about half-way to the edges, then deselect (see below):

7.    Now we need to fill our selection with a gradient made up of our two colours (the blue and pink). To do this, run your mouse over the small arrowhead over the pink square on the Styles palette (see right). When it turns into the eyedropper, and you are exactly on top of the arrowhead, left-click. When you see the pop-up menu, click the second option, which is the square-shaped icon next to the paintbrush.

Now run your mouse over the new gradient square and left-click again. You'll see the gradient menu pop up, with several choices. Make sure you have these settings: Horizontal=50, Vertical=50, Angle=0 and Repeat=0. We will be working with the linear gradient (to select this, click on the first square on the Style menu).

8.    Left-click on the vertical scroll arrow to the left of the gradient window, and when the full pop-up menu opens, scroll up to the top of the box. We need the gradient that's in the top-left hand corner, the very first one. It should say "foreground". Left-click on this, and then 'OK'. We now have a gradient fill for our pearl.

9.    Almost finished now! Just a couple of more things to do. Select the paintbucket and fill the circle with the new gradient we've just made. Do NOT deselect. You should now have something like what you can see on the left, below. With the pearl still selected, go to effects>illumination>sunburst. We need to go with the default settings here, so just to be on the safe-side, click on the "return to default setting" box on the bottom right hand corner (see below-right). Hit 'OK', and leave the pearl selected.

10.    With the pearl still selected, go to Effects>blur>gaussian blur, and as we need a LOT of blur, change the radius setting to 5.00 (see right). Click 'OK'. STILL leave the pearl selected . . .

11.    To give our pearl some definition, we'll add a slight drop shadow. Go to effects>3D Effects>Drop shadow, and go with these settings: Vertical=4, Horizontal=4, Opacity=33, Blur=11, and Colour=black. Hit 'OK'. STILL leaving the pearl selected, go back to effects>3D Effects>Drop shadow and this time: Vertical= -4, Horizontal= -4, Opacity=33, Blur=11 and colour set to black again (see right). Hit 'OK'. This gives definition to BOTH sides of our pearl. Now you can (finally!) deselect.

You should now have . . . . ta-daaaaaa! A beautiful, brand new pearl.

Have fun with this and experiment. You can play around with the gradient colours for different eye-catching effects, try colourizing them, resize them, turn them into a tubes, etc. They look really great set against a dark background. If you make a set of them in all different sizes and colours and place them against a dark blue or black background they'd make a terrific solar system. With just a little imagination, there are plenty of things you could do with them. I resized mine to 40%, tubed it, and look what I made below . . . . (If ONLY they were real!!) :)