Animated butterfly with Shadow
by kim@pixelbit.com

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

Open a butterfly tube that has two spread wings.
If you don't have one, use mine (You will have to tube it)

Use your lasso tool and select ONLY the left wing

Paste as a new image.

In the wing image, increase the canvas size to 300 X 300 with the left placement button clicked.

In your layer palette, duplicate your layer.
Use deformation tool.
Press and HOLD SHIFT + CTRL.
With your mouse grab the node along the left edge,
Push in and up slightly, as shown below.
Click the selection tool to apply the deformation

In your layer palette, duplicate the top layer.
Use deformation tool the same way. make this layer look like the image below.

Continue until you have five wing layers.

Save your image as wing.psp and close.

on your original butterfly image, select the body. Copy

Open animation shop.
CTRL + V to paste the body as a new image.
Click File > Preferences > General Program Preferences > Layered files
Be sure that Keep all layers on separate frames is checked and click ok.
Open your wing.psp.

Make the wing active, select all (CTRL + A), Copy (CTRL + C) and paste as a new animation (CTRL + V)
You should now have two identical wing images.

On the new wing, click on the first frame and press your delete key.
repeat for the LAST frame.
Select all and reverse frames, Copy

On your original wing, click on the last frame to be sure that only that frame is selected, Paste after current.

You can close the wing that you reversed the frames on as you no longer need it.
Look at the wing animation that you have open and verify that it has 8 frames.

Click View > Animation. You left wing should look like this.

Close the view window and lets move on.
Make the body active. Click the duplicate button until you have 8 body frames.
**HINT** While duplicating, you will have more than one frame selected, so watch the number of frames carefully.
You can delete a few if you need to.

Back to your wing, Select all, copy and paste as new.
Select all on the new and CTRL + M to mirror.
Now you should have both wings, left and right and body, all with 8 frames.

Make the body active, select all, copy
Make the left wing active, select all and paste (CTRL + E) the body onto the left wing.

make the right wing active,
Click the crop tool, click on options, select opaque, click crop

your right wing should look like this.
Select all, copy

Make the left wing image (also has the body on it) and paste (CTRL + E) the right wing.

Your butterfly will look like this now

Crop.
If all you want is the butterfly, you're done, save.
If you would like it to have a shadow, lets move on.
Open a new transparent image 350 X 350

Duplicate the frames so it has 8,
Make the butterfly active, select all, copy
make the transparent active, select all, paste (CTRL + E)
Place the butterfly in the lower right corner.

Select all. Click File > Export frames > To paint Shop Pro.
You will be automatically taken back to PSP with a brand new 8 layered image on your screen
Make the top layer active.
Use deformation tool
Skew the top butterfly the same way you skewed the wings earlier with these differences
1. This time you are grabbing the node along the TOP edge
2. You are pulling LEFT and DOWN
3. on EACH layer, make sure the upper left node winds up in the exact spot.
Use the transparency squares as a marker.
**HINT** No need to apply the deformation after each layer,
when you have the top layer where you want it, just click on the next layer.

When you are done will all of the layers, apply the deformation. Your butterflies will look like this.

Grayscale your image.

Make the top layer active, Press SHIFT + B to bring up the brightness window.
Set the brightness to -125. feel free to adjust this setting to your liking.

Repeat for all layers.

Update back to animation shop

Close your image in PSP without saving. It must be closed to work on it further in Animation shop.
OK we are back to Animation shop
Activate the butterfly animation, select all, copy
Make the shadow active, select all, paste (CTRL + E) the butterfly onto the shadow making dire the bottom of the butterfly and the bottom of the shadow are touching.

Crop

Your animation should look like this

If you want to stop here, save
if you want to place your butterfly on a flower, lets move on.

Open a new transparent image 350 X 350 and duplicate the frames to 8.
make the butterfly active. Select all, copy.
Make the transparent active, select all and paste (CTRL + E)
This time place the butterfly in the middle.

Select all, CTRL + R to rotate, I rotated 25 degrees to the left.
Use the crop tool to manually crop off the white area (use your mouse to draw a square around the butterfly)
Make your square bigger than you actually need it but does not include any white area on the corners.
Press the crop tool and let Animation crop it the rest of the way.  COPY
Open the flower that you want to put the butterfly on.
Duplicate frames to 8
Select all, paste (CTRL + E)

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