Making Blinkies
Want to know how to make those cute blinkies? This tutorial will show you how to do it in Animation Shop 3.
First, open a new image in paint or PSP (I would recomend paint for this). Make one round box like mine.
Decide on a color for the box and fill it with that color. Add shading and highlights.
Count the letters that you want in your blinkie and copy your shaded box that amount of times.
Next, make sure your image is large enough and type something underneath your boxes. I'm using BitDust1. Click here to download it.
Click on the select icon. Make sure it's set to transparent.
Select each letter individually and place it in the middle of each box. (Before you do this, you might want to check to see if there are any gray areas around the letters. if there are, change them to white. Trust me, it will look a lot better if you get rid of all of the gray.) If you want to add a pixel next to the blinkie, now is the time to do it.
Please Note: if you don't have a program that allows you to make images transparent, don't do the following steps.
Resize the blinkie so it's not so big, and fill the background with a color that you know you won't be using. Make sure you get all of the white.
Save it (I recomend .png or just .bmp) and open it in PSP. Go to Image >> Palette >> Set image transparency and select "Set transparency value to palate entry". Click on the color box next to it and find the green background color.
Click ok. Go to Image >> Palette >> View image transparency for the transparency to actually show up. Save the image as .gif.
Open the blinkie image in Animation Shop and animate it the way you want. If you're not sure how to animate it, go back and read the Basic Animation tutorial.
Finally, just click File >> Save, and you're all done! You now have a transparent blinkie. Have fun with this!
A link back is appriciated if this helped you!