My Background

OK - lots of you have asked how I got my index page backgrounds done, and I promised I'd write a tut on it one day ... well, here's the tut :)

The eBook of this tutorial and the supplies you need are here

1. Find an image to use as a texture - I chose a fractal image and cut it down to what I wanted. If you like you can use the same image portion I have, you'll find it in the attached zip - put this into your textures folder.

2. Decide what colours you want to use - choose a dark colour for your foreground and a slightly lighter colour for your background - I used #000040 and #000080 for this page.

3. Open a new 200 x 200 image and flood fill with your dark colour. Open your background texture palette (the very bottom one) and choose the fractal you are using as your texture.

4. Right click to flood fill with your background colour and texture - repeat if you think it needs it

5. Use FM Tile Tools>Blend Emboss with the default settings, but uncheck the box at the bottom - repeat as often as you think you need to so your tile has definition

6. Now you just need to make your tile seamless and you're done!

*** You CAN change colours easily if you want - just use PSP's colour function to get the colour you want :) ***

You can also use other kinds of images other than fractals, here is a tile I made with an image of a tree - I selected the black on the branches, did an inner bevel on it and then did steps 3 - 6. This time I used a gradient as my foreground colour and this is what I ended up with