Making Font Accent Pieces ~ tutorial by Whisper

Making Accent Pieces with Fonts
tutorial by Whisper

This tutorial was created and put on this site on September 25, 2004.
It is property of and ©2001-2004 to Whisper's Web Works.
Terms of Use

For this tutorial you will need:
Paint Shop Pro ~ download a trial version.
Super Blade Pro ~ download the demo here.
Glassygold SBP preset ~ download here, unzip into your SBP Enviroments & Textures folder.
A fancy or script font ~ I used Vladimir Script, but it is not a freeware font.
Try here for some free script fonts.

Open a new image:
300 x 300 pixels
Transparent
16.7 Million colors

Flood fill the first layer with black.

Activate your font tool.

Set your foreground to null and your background to solid white.

Click inside your image to place your letter.

These are the settings I used:
Create as Vector
Vladimir Script
Size 48
Stroke 0
Anti-alias checked

Objects > Align > Center in canvas.

In your layer palette, right click on the vector layer and convert to raster layer.

Layer > Duplicate.

Image > Flip.

Image > Mirror.

Activate your deformation tool.

While holding down the CTRL key use your down arrow to move the duplicate down under the first letter.

You can also use the right and left arrows to position it better to your liking.

Turn off your first (black filled) layer. Right click on either of the letter layers and Merge > Merge visible.

Edit > Cut.

Edit > Paste > Paste as new layer.
(This will center your image.)

In your layer palette right click on your merged layer and delete.

Turn your black filled layer back on.

Activate the top layer - the one with the letters on it.

Layers > Duplicate.

The next step is what makes the accent unique. The following list are suggestions, apply only one or combine them.

	Image > Rotate > Free rotate > these settings: Right 90 Single layer around canvas center checked
	Image > Flip.
	Image > Rotate > Free rotate > same settings. AND Image > Mirror.