• Author: Toby
• Date Added: Dec 14, 2006
• Tutorial Views: 22,663
• Rating: 3.89 out of 5
• Total Votes: 38

Options

» View Tutorial
» Rate Tutorial
» Comments (5)
» Tell a friend

This tutorial was written using Jasc Paint Shop Pro 9, hopefully it can be used for other versions, also I think its aimed more towards someone who has some knowledge of Paint Shop Pro. Learn the steps needed to create vector shapes. You will learn how to create an Apple ipod nano from scratch, possibly for use on a music site.

Create a new document, size 350x550. Flood fill with whatever background color you would like, I am just using white for now. Set your foreground color to #aeaeae and background color to #e1e3e2. We want to use Paint Shop Pro's "foreground-background" gradient feature with these settings Angle: 295, Repeats: 0, and Invert: unchecked. Do this for both the foreground and background properties windows. Select your "Rectangle tool" by pressing "G" on your keyboard. The settings for your "Rectangle tool" should be as followed Mode: Draw Rectangle, Show Nodes: Checked, Create On Vector: Checked, Horizontal Radius: 12.00, Vertical Radius: 6.00, Left: 60.50, Top: 10.50, Width: 230.00, Height: 525.00, Line Style: Solid, Width: 1.00, Anti-alias: checked, Join: Miter join, and finally Miter limit: 15. This will give us our base shape for the Apple ipod Nano.

At this point lets go ahead and rename the vector shape you just created "base" to make things easyer down the road. We want to save this shape as a selection so with the "base" layer selected go to Selections > Select All then Selections > Float, and last Selections > Load/Save selection > Save selection to Alpha Channel. Name the alpha channel "base" and click save. To remove the selection Selections > Select None. In your Layers window you will now notice a new layer named "Promoted Selection" this is just a by-product of us saving the selection to an alpha channel so go ahead and delete it.

Time to turn on our grid to make life easyer View > Change Grid, Guide, and Snap Properties. Set the "Current image settings" to Horizontal grids: 5, Vertical grids: 5, Units: Pixels, Color: #5e5e5e, and Snap influence: 100. Back to View > Grid, we want to make sure "Snap to Grid" is on so click "View" once again and look for a small square around the icon next to "Snap to Grid", if there is no square present then click on "Snap to Grid" to turn it on.

Create a new vector layer Layers > New vector layer, name it "dark shades". Now select your "Pen tool" with the following settings Mode: Draw lines, Line style: solid, width: 21.00, Anti-alias: checked, Join: Miter, and Miter limit: 15 also set your foreground color to black. Draw two seperate lines down the sides of our "base" shape.

To make those lines into shadows Adjust > Blur > Gaussian Blur > Radius: 6.00. What we want to do now is erase the part of the lines that is not on out "base" shape. To accomplish this we need our "base" selection so go to Selections > Load/Save Alpha channel > Load Selection from Alpha channel. Then Selections > Invert selection. Now press "S" and just hit "Delete" on your keyboard.

This step is basically repeating steps two and three with some small changes. Create a new vector layer Layers > New vector layer, name it "light shades". Now select your "Pen tool" with the following settings Mode: Draw lines, Line style: solid, width: 10.00, Anti-alias: checked, Join: Miter, and Miter limit: 15 also set your foreground color to white. Draw two seperate lines down the sides of our "base" shape, just inside of our "dark shade" lines. Then repeat step three Adjust > Blur > Gaussian Blur > Radius: 6.00, Selections > Load/Save Alpha channel > Load Selection from Alpha channel, and Selections > Invert selection. Now press "S" and hit "Delete" on your keyboard. This will bring out more contour and shape to our Apple ipod nano.

Now that we have a decent base to work with lets add the screen. Create a new vector layer Layers > New vector layer, name it "screen & dial". Select your "Rectangle tool", the settings for your "Rectangle tool" should be as followed Mode: Draw Rectangle, Show Nodes: Checked, Create On Vector: Checked, Horizontal Radius: 6.00, Vertical Radius: 6.00, Left: 85.00, Top: 38.50, Width: 180.00, Height: 140.00, Line Style: Solid, Width: 4.00, Anti-alias: checked, Join: Miter join, and finally Miter limit: 15. Have your foreground color set to #494a4e and the background color set to white.