Creating a quilted or stained glass effect is very easy with Paint Shop Pro. You can either start out with a pattern that is already colored (what I do in this tutorial since I feel I am very color impaired), or with a black and white stained glass or quilting pattern. Either way, the technique is a lot of fun and can create great results like my Quilters Heaven page splash screen. You will need to download the original quilt graphic and the Blade Pro preset at the end of this page before you begin.

To create this graphic:

1. Open the quilt graphic in Paint Shop Pro.
2. Duplicate the graphic and put the original away for future reference (easier to start over this way).
3. Click on the peach color with the Magic Wand tool. Choose Selections|Modify|Select Similar.
4. Choose Selections|Modify|Expand and expand by 1. Flood fill with a color of choice or leave as is.
5. Apply the Blade Pro Quilt preset.
6. Click on the green color and repeat the process. Continue until you have all the colors selected, filled and beveled.
7. Click inside the white interior on the Background layer and expand your selection by 1.
8. Add a new layer and flood fill with the quilt background color.
9. Add another new layer. Apply the Cutout filter Color: Black, Blur 2, Offset 2,2 Opacity 100%.
10. Adjust the opacity slider on this layer until you get the look you want.
11. Add another new layer and add your text. Apply the same Blade Pro Preset to your text. Save your text selections to an Alpha Channel.
12. If you want, add another layer and add drop shadows to your text by loading the text selections and applying the shadow. Apply the shadow at 100% opacity and then adjust the opacity slider until the shadow looks the way you want it to look.
13. If your text is not lined up correctly, turn off all layers except for the text and shadow layers. Choose Layers|Merge then Merge Visible. Then, select your text and move it where you want it to be.
14. Save your graphic as a psp file for future use.
15. Save as a jpg.
16. I diced the quilt splash screen into six sections for faster loading with Picture Dicer. See my links page for a link to download the freeware version of Dicer.
    
    

Shift-Click here to download the BladePro Preset.