Software Used: Paint Shop Pro 6
This signature logo was created for Tara Mahovetz, About.com's former Guide to West Palm Beach, Florida.
The
brush used in this tutorial is originally from Nikki's Brush Boutique which
has since gone offline. You can download the single brush used in this tutorial
here. For PSP6, place it in your Paint
Shop Pro\Brushes folder and restart. For PSP7, go to Edit > Preferences >
File Locations > Brushes and point to the folder where the file is located. (Continued below...)
This tutorial uses a lot of screen shots so I've split it into two pages for faster loading.
1.) Start with a new image 300 x 300 pixels, white background.
2.) In the layer palette, click the create layer button. Name the layer
Tree.
3.) Select the paintbrush 
tool. In the tool options palette, change the brush type to custom,
then select the palm tree brush. In the cursor and tablet options tab, make
sure precise cursors is checked.
4.)
In the color palette, make sure the foreground color is black.
5.) Move your cursor into the image and click once when the palm tree outline is completely visible in the image.
6.) The palm tree is much larger than we need, so click the deformation
tool to resize it. Drag one of the corner handles until the palm tree is about
one half of its original size, then double-click inside the bounding box to
apply the change.
7.) Select the text tool 
and click in your image to bring up the text dialog box.
8.) Type your name in a medium to bold weight font around 60-70 points in size. Under "Create as..." make sure that floating and antialiased are checked.
9.) Move the text in place so the base of the text is even with the base of the palm tree.
10.) The layer palette will show your text as a floating selection.
Right-click on the floating selection in the layer palette and choose Promote
to Layer. Double-click the promoted layer in the layer palette and rename
the layer to "Name".
11.) Right-click the Tree layer and duplicate it. Do the same for the Name layer.
 12.)
Hide all layers but the two new duplicates you just created, by clickinjg
on the eyeglasses in the layers palette. Then right-click on one of them
and choose Merge -> Visible. |
 13.)
Rename the merged layer "Shadow". Drag it to the bottom
of the stack, just above the background. Then hide it, and make the Name
and Tree layers visible. |
14.) On the Name and Tree layer, click the lock icon to
lock the transparency for the layer (no red X means transparency is protected).
Locking transparency preserves the empty portions of the layer so that we can
paint on only the areas that contain pixels.
15.) Select the paintbrush tool. Set the brush to a round brush, about
25 pixels in size. Set the foreground color to a bright tropical color.
Paint over the text to completely fill it with color.
16.) Set the foreground to a light brown color (my color is shown to
the right), reduce the brush size, switch to the tree layer, and paint in the
trunk of the palm tree. Switch to a green foreground color and paint the leaves
of the palm tree.
Your image should look something like mine.
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