If you have seen tiaras, you know that they are fairly complex and usually very symetrical. You must say "how can I do that?" well you only do half of it by hand, mostly the left side then use copy/paste/flip horizontal and then some automitic functions to cover any discrepencies and there you are. I use the Paint program that comes with Windoews. Let me demonstrate.

While this lesson concerns itself with one tiara that I drew, let it serve as an example from whic to learn

1. Begin with a blank "canvas". For my purposes 254 x 159 Pixels will do fine, I will cut and past later 2. I select or create the color I am going to use, in this case I am using the light gray one, I usually custom desighn some shade of gold. Since this is to start as a half-size drawing, I will go as far to the left as I can and still have room to move the cursor around it. Using the rectangle tool I draw the band, keeping in mind that the tiara will be about twice as long as it is tall. 3, Using "Brush" I do the filigree work. Until I start, I do not know what shape I will end up with. I will often zoom to large size (View, Zoom Large Size). I tend to use "scroll" elements. These sweep upwards and inwards with curlicues on one or both ends. You will notice that there is a bit of the band left over in the center from where my elements end. This is deliberarte. That way when I copy and paste I can be sure there is no break in the band which I would need to fill in later. 4. I go to Select and draw around the imagage. I will want it reasonably close but I will not try and be crazy about it. I then right-click and choose Copy. I will then choose Edit, then Paste, then go to Image, choose Flip/Rotate, choose flip horizontal and click, then I will go to the toolbox and select the transparent background and move the pasted image into place. You can see that the parts do not quite join at the center. This is deliberate in this case. With a bit of "Brush" work I could join the elements at the top center. Then Fill with Color, red, and have a heart (which is what people ask me to do when they hear my jokes). < 5. Now comes the interesting part. I developed this to cover slight imperfections. In my early drawings,I was not able to align the two halves accurately so I would darw these "decorations" which I found I could use as the settings for "stones", to cover up the mismatch. Now, with View/Large size and Tramsparent background, I can do much better. But these are still useful bits. Using the various tools and working in large size I used the elipse tool in solid mode to draw the places where I will put the big stones. and thid Line tool to put in some of the straight lines. I often have to undo and redraw but I get it righ> eventually. This takes practice.

WHAT HAPPENED?! 6. I had too much background so I went in used Select to cut out a reasonably sized image. then selected Image, stretch/skew and set the numbers to 10 for both width and height and Pasted the image on my clipboard back in. If it asks you if you want to expand the size of the bitmap say "Yes". 7. Now I added the stones. The first is a kind of peridot. I went to Zomm/Large size. I made the dark part with Edit colors/custom colors and the elipse tool then I chose a lighter color and the Fill with Color tool the a lighter color still and Brush with the smallest dot for the lightest color and in the center I put a white highlight. For the pearl I created the color in Edit Colors/Custom colors used successively smaller Brush settingw with successively lightter colors and smaller "Brush"es. Then the white hightlight and that was it. NOW WHAT?! 8. I did the following. chose Select and right-clicked on the picture and chose Select all then Cut then I went to Edit Color/Custom Color and made a kind of indigo and used the Fill with Color. I then Paste'd and set the background to transparent. I then had to replace the two white highlights in the stones. I took a look at it and decided that the tiara might be better as an antique gold so I went to Edit Colors/Custom Color. made up a gold. went to large size and used the Fill With Color plauced on the impage and that was it. Learning to make the Bitmap backgound transparent makes many things possible. You can use they tiara in the clipboard as part of another drawing. The make lovely trim or over-door ornaments. Or, like me you can just peel (Using Select, Select all, Cut) it off to change the background color without having to get into tiny spaces with the Fill With Color tool then paste it back in This is a very basic image. At some point you may want to add hightlights and shadows to make the tiara stand out. but from this, you can see that a very attractive basic tiara is not a hard thing to make. To be sure, like everything else and especially drawing, this will take a bit of practice. However, as you see from my description. I did not exactly bust my magic wand on this image although I did have to "undo" and redo a few times. and I did a good deal of the work zommed in to large size, but that is all right; you get used to it. This is to show that, when you see any of my tiara drawings, if you think I slaved over it, you now know better. Now that I have the finished work, I can do things with it. most of these ususally involve turning it int a gif. However, before I do that, I can do background effects like this: Or, I can amke it a gif with IRFANVIEW and the plugins, and make a transparent backgound by using File/Save as/gif/ check "save transparency" and select the background color Then I can do things with it. like use it for a graphic link or some other things. Or... why not do both backgoround effects AND a transparent backgorund? It is all good. Well, anyway, now you know my dirty little secret :giggle: