8. Take your magic wand and click in the center of your ellipse, then go to selections, modify expand put in the number 1 click ok. then flood fill with your other color (the lighter color). Then go to layers add a new raster layer, then go to selections modify contract and put in the number 3 then click ok, then flood fill with your darker color. Go to selections modify contract then put in the number 3. then flood fill again with your lighter color. Selections , Select none.

Now to Make the chain

1. Open a new image 150x150 transparent. You want the darker chains on the outside where they meet your top and bottom pieces and the lighter color the middle chain. Set your background (lighter color) to null and your foreground should be your darker color. Go to your preset shapes, ellipse and the same settings make sure your size is still 3.00. Uncheck create as vector. And draw a small ellipse. What I did to make sure they were the same size was to go to edit then copy then paste as a new layer on the first one. so you have two exactly alike. Then I went to selections select all then float then I flood filled with the light color to make a lighter one exactly the same size. Then paste as a new layer again so that I have two of the dark one's and one light one.

2. Ok now you should have three rings two of the darker color and one of the lighter color we want the lighter color ring in the center. Line them up where you want them to loop. You will need to zoom in to do this second part. You want to erase the part of the dark ring that goes over the light ring make your eraser about size 1 or 2 depending on which is easier for you to work with and I erased one pixel at a time. See Image below to see how I did this.

3. Merge your layers visible on your chain. Then go to edit then copy. Then paste as a new layer on your Ellipse. Then move so that it is at the points on the flat line side. Make a second copied layer for the other side. And attach the same way. So that they are hanging down evenly when you are happy with your image close the visibility of your background layer and merge visible.

4. You will need to make a copy of this for the footer. Hit shift and the letter D. On the copy go to image flip so that this is now upside down. Add your decorations and any text you would like to add. On the bottom piece you can Perhaps add where they can email their stamps to you so you can swap. (by the way you can save these before you decorate them and colorize them)

After your done decorating and taking a little break we will make the dividers

The Divider Bars

1. Ok how I figured the length and height was to figure out how many stamps I wanted to have on one line which worked out to be 10 that fit nicely and didn't go over the edge of the top or bottom. I lined them up side by side and this is what I came up with. (I'm telling you so that if you have larger stamps you will need to change this a bit.) This is figured for the smaller stamps from a tutorial you can find here. Signature Stamps By Linda My group Designing Divas inspired me to write this as they just loved making stamps from this tutorial. And at the rate we are going we won't have room for them on a rack so I did this.

2. Open a new transparent image 402 width x 47 height. Flood fill with your lighter color. Make your background color the darker color and go to image add borders and add a border of 3 using the darker color.

3. Decorate to your taste I used one of the images in my table and duplicated that layer then went to image and mirror so that it was even on both sides.

4. Save the first divider blank. And make a copy. You never know when you will come up with a new category of stamps. Use the copy to make your other dividers. Add your text using your darker color. After you add your text go to objects and align then Center on Canvas. This will make it perfectly centered. This will only work if it is in vectors. You can view source on my page to learn how to set these up if you like. I tried doing it using a table but that left gaps between the stamps so I used html. A friend actually helped me with that part. Thank you Bri and Lesley for your help in making this tutorial possible.

To Export as a gif (transparent image) follow these directions below

Click File > Export > GIF Optimizer. On the Transparency tab make the choice that fits whether you want transparency or not and whether your image already has transparency or not. That's straightforward. Ignore the Partial Transparency tab if your image doesn't have partial transparency. On the Colors tab is all the IMPORTANT stuff. SET DITHERING TO ZERO. Set Color Selection to OPTIMIZED OCTREE or Optimized Median Cut, whichever looks better. Start with 256 for the Number of Colors and reduce this slowly if you need to make the file size smaller. Keep checking the appearance in the right preview and the file size noted under this preview. When you are happy, press OK. Your files should look just fine and you will see in the preview exactly what you will be getting."

I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial and try some of my other tutorial's as well.

If you would like a certain area of your bottom piece to be clickable instead of the whole piece a good site to learn to make a image map is Bri's Tutorial's

If you would like to send me your results I would be happy to post them on my testers pages. If they aren't full that is lol.Thank you Jane Braz for the use of your wonderful tubes.Please visit Jane's Site she has some wonderful tutorials and some great tubes.

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©Sunshine Designs Feb. 7, 2004