Bird in Flight

by kim@pixelbit.com
 

This tutorial is copyrighted. Feel free to visit as often as you like, but don't steal my work.

This tutorial will explain the steps on making THIS bird.
If you are using a different bird, the basic steps are the same but you may have to
modify sides and directions.

For this tutorial, you will need a side view of a bird. If you don't have one,
use mine (you will have to tube it)

Use your lasso tool set to point to point and select the wing. Click on the wing with your mouse (lasso still active) to form the selection and also to float the layer.
Selections > Promote Selection to layer.

In your layer palette you should now have 2 layers. top layer is a wing without a bird, bottom layer is a bird without a wing.

Turn off the promoted layer and lets clean up the bird.

Use your selection tool to select and delete the "slop"

Use your clone tool, settings shown below

Rebuild the part of the bird that was deleted when you promoted the selection to a layer.

Copy the bird and paste as a new image, save in psp format. Close.

In your image that is still open, turn off the bird layer and turn on the wing.
Be sure the wing is active.

Duplicate your layer. Use the deformation tool.
Press CTRL + SHIFT.
Grab the node along the LEFT EDGE and push in and up lightly as shown below.

Apply the deformation. Duplicate that layer and repeat the deformation.

Continue until your image looks something like this.

In your layer palette, rename your wing layers as shown below.

Use the crop tool, click on the setting shown below.

Look at the lower right corner of the screen to see the exact size of your image.
Mine shows width=55, height=128

Image > Canvas size. make the canvas size the SAME height but exactly double the width.
In the placement, make sire the LEFT button is pressed and click ok.

With each layer, duplicate, mirror and arrange the layers in the reverse order, as shown below.

**HINT**
In the image above, you can see a small gap between the left wings and the right wings.
To fix that, activate the mover tool,
click on each mirrored wing (being VERY careful not to move it),
Click the left arrow once or twice to close the gap.
You MUST click the arrow key the SAME number of times
on all mirrored layers for it to look right in Animation Shop.

Keep the bird layer closed but have all of the wing layers on, save in psp format.
Open Animation shop.
Click File > Preferences > General Program Preferences > Layered Files.
Adjust your settings as shown below, click ok.

Open your wings image, count the number of frames it has.
Open a new image, transparent, 300 X 300
Open the bird that you set aside earlier. copy and paste (CTRL + E) onto your transparent image.
You can close your original bird.
Duplicate the frames until it has the same number of frames as your wings.

Activate the wings, select all (CTRL + A) and copy (CTRL + C)
Activate the bird, Select all and paste (CTRL + E) the wings onto the bird.
Your animation will look like this...you are almost done.

You can close your wings image now are you are done with it.
Select all, copy and paste as a new animation (CTRL + V)
Now you have 2 identical animations.
On the new animation, with the arrow tool selected, click on the first frame and delete.
Click on the last frame and delete that one well.
Select all.
Click Animations > Reverse frames.
Copy.

 Make your original active, Click on the last frame. Right click and select paste > After current.

All that is left to do is crop.
Click on the crop tool, select opaque in the crop options, click crop.

Voila

Your bird is in flight.

If you would like your bird to fly faster, select all, right click and select Frame Properties.
The default number is 10. Change it to a lower number for the wings to move faster, click ok
Save. and you're done.

I hope you have enjoyed my tutorial.
If you have any questions or comments, email me at:
kim@pixelbit.com