Creating a background with Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7 or 8

Did you get Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7 or 8? Would you like to learn how to make a background with this program? Well, you came to the right place.

First off, I will teach you how to make a simple border background, with a plain body-color background.

first thing I would do, is go to File, then chose Browse to bring up the paint shop pro folder browser.



Once you have the browser open, you can double click on the image you want to use, and it will bring up the image in your paint program.



Now that you have your image open, Its time to begin working on it to transform the image into what you need it to be for your border. The first thing you need to do with it, is make sure its the right size. Allpoetry borders have a set capability for the margin on the left hand side. I'll go into that more later. For now, you will just have to take my word for it. lol. Anyway, what you need to do, is click on Image on the top bar, then click on Resize.



I have found that 200 wide by 300 high makes a nice size for a border. When you have the dimensions set, as shown in the screenshot above, go ahead and click ok. Now that you have a nicely resized image to use as your border, the next step is to open a new image to use for your solid background colour. To do that, you go to file, then new. It opens a box that looks like this:



I usually chose white. Also, I usually usually use a size of 1122 wide by 300 high. Its a nice size that fits most monitors. For now, its good enough. We will pick our own custom colour to use for the solid colour body. To do that, first you need to select the eyedropper tool:



Now that you have the eyedropper tool, go ahead and find a nice colour in the image that you will use for the border. you hover the eyedropper tool over the image, and when you see a colour you like, you simply click on it. It holds that colour for you in the colour palette window so you can use it.



Now that you have a good colour picked, it's time to put that colour into your solid colour background. To do that, you chose the flood fill tool, and that looks like a bucket of paint thats being spilled.



After chosing the flood fill, you simply click in the new image that you opened for the solid colour background.



Now you have a plain colour background. For the next step, you need to go back to your border image. Click on Effects, 3d effects, then buttonize. It will bring up a box like this:



Once its set the way I have it shown, you can click ok. Now, your border image is ready to be placed into the body image. To do that, you click on the regular arrow icon, then right click on the border image. Then chose copy. Now, go to the body image, and right click in the body image. Chose paste as new layer. It will put your border image into the body image, in the dead center of the image, similar to this:



Now that you have it pasted in, you will notice your arrow cursor changed to look like cross hairs. Thats good, because now you need to move your image over to the left of the body for it to form the border. Click, hold and drag the border image to the left side of the body image and try your best to line it up to the edges. Try not to have any gaps on the edges, as it will throw off the look of your border.



Once I have it here, I like to add a little splash of artistic flair to the background by adding a drop shadow to the border image. You can add a drop shadow by going to Effects, then 3D Effects, then Drop shadow. Set your vertical to 0 (or else it wont line up correctly on your poem) and I usually set my horizontel to 5. In this one, I chose the colour black for my drop shadow. Then, you just hit ok and you should have something similar to this:



The last step is this... right click on your newly drop shadowed image, and chose copy merged. Then right click in an open section of paint shop pro's screen, and chose paste as new image. Congradulations, you have made your first border background! Now, dont forget to save it somewhere, by going to file, save as... Now, make sure you save as a JPEG image so you can load it to a poem on Allpoetry. Give it a name like "My first bg" and click save.



Once you have your background, you need to put it on a poem. The first thing you do here is log into your AP account (I assume, since your reading this, that you are already logged in, lol) and go to the poem you would like to add this background to. Once you get there, you need to click on Edit Background, located here:



Now, just click on New and it will bring down this little box:



Now, chose your background from where you saved it:



Click Add Background, and it will take you to this screen:



Once here, make sure your border is lined up properly.



and then, simply click Edit Background:



Now it will take you to the page to chose colours for your text, links, and visited links. To simplify things, we will use one colour for this, white. Bring up each of the three little boxes you see, and move the cross hair to where the white is in that colour. (along the very bottom of the box is white, near the right hand corner.) Do the same for each of the three boxes, then click Submit.



Congradulations, you have created and added your very own, very first border background.