Summer Cottage Tube Painting in Paint Shop Pro

Paint Shop Pro Tutorial by Arizona Kate

'Fine Tuning the Picture Tube'

One of Paint Shop Pro's popular painting tools is the Picture Tube ....commonly called 'Tubes'. With a small collection of Tube files (*.tub) we can create a tube painting similar to the one above. No drawing skills needed! Many tubes are designed to be used in much the same way as a rubber stamp. In this tutorial, we'll create this 'Summer Cottage' landscape painting with a few tubes you probably already have. Along the way, we'll show you a few artistic tricks to 'fine tune' your tubes to add more interest and depth to your painting!


(reduced in size)

Items needed:

Paint Shop Pro   This tutorial was written for Paint Shop Pro version 8, however, many versions of PSP include the Picture Tube tool. Users of just about any version should be able to follow along, however, some icons may look different and some tool options may be a little different than what I've described here for PSP 8. If you have any trouble following along, just write me or visit the PSP Forum at about.com to find some help.

Experience level This is a moderately easy tutorial. Some familiarity with the basic PSP tools and zip files is all that's needed.

Clip Art   You will also need some clip art of a house or cottage and any other finishing details you might want to add to your 'Summer Cottage' painting. If you don't have any cottage clip art, you may download 'Alice's Cottage' below. It is a PSP 8 file (.pspimage) saved as PSP 7 compatible.



Tubes   We'll be creating a landscape scene, so we will need tubes for flowers, grass, Clouds, trees, etc. In creating this tube painting, I've tried to use just those tubes that were included with Paint Shop Pro 7 or 8 (or were provided free by Jasc on their website). If you have other scenery/landscape tubes, there's no reason you can't use them too! (More are available at about.com)



After downloading the scenery tubes from this website, you must unzip the file using WinZip or a similar program and then install each tube in your Paint Shop Pro tubes folder.

---

Installing tubes:
Unzip scenerytubes.zip in the normal manner and then open one of the tube files in the collection with PSP.
Select File>Export>Picture Tube.
Fill out the information in the dialog box pertaining to number of cells across and cells down. The number of cells is the same as number of objects across/down in each unzipped .tub image... the number will vary with each tube. Use the default choices for other settings. Give tube file a name and save.
Open the next tube file in the collection and install it. Continue until all tubes are installed.
Please refer to the 'Installing Tubes' tutorial on this website if you need more help.

---

Other   If you want to frame your painting, you will need to (1) create a frame, (2) use one of the frames included with PSP, or (3) find one on the web that is free to download! We will also be using the 'landscape morning' preset gradient included with PSP 7 and 8. If you don't have that gradient, please write to me and I will send it to you.

Continued on page 2...

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction and Files Needed
2. Getting Started, Clouds and Lawn
3. Trees
4. Cottage and Path
5. Shrubs, More Trees, Making Adjustments
6. Flowerbed, Weeds, More Flowers
7. Finishing Details