Christian Creations PSP Tutorials  

PSP 8 Ellipse to heart

Paint Shop Pro 8 changed vectors completely. I must say although it took me a bit to figure out what was going on I like the new way of doing vectors. They added several options but my favorite is that now I can do all my vectors on one layer which is great for exporting shapes. Bottom line is that once you find everything vectors are much easier in PSP 8 then in PSP 7.

New 300x300 transparent image.

Foreground and background color is your choice. I set my foreground color to black so that you can see the outline. Normally I would set it to same color as the background color. I set my background color to red.

Select Preset shapes tool (make sure Create as vector is checked) and select the Ellipse shape.

Draw an ellipse roughly as big as you want your heart to be. Click Objects>Align>Center in Canvas to put your ellipse in the center.

Now select your Pen tool this automatically put you in Node edit mode. Click on the left center node (a node is represented by a little box) and hit delete. You should only have the right half of the ellipse now.

Click on the top node. There should be a line running through the node with a circle on the left and an arrow on the right. Click on the arrow and drag up to make the curve shape for your heart.

Click on the bottom node and drag the circle end up so that it is pointing at the right center node.

Click on the right center node. This is where you heart will really take shape. Drag both the circle end and the arrow end until you get the desired effect. If you need to click on the top and bottom nodes to do further adjusting.

Right click on one of the nodes and click Edit>Duplicate no offset. Then right click on one of the node and click Transform selected nodes>Mirror.

Now we need to get the path going in same direction as the first half so right click on one of the node and click Edit>Reverse path. You won't see any changes on your screen.

All your nodes should be selected so left click on one of the and drag the shape just to left of the original.

Click anywhere outside of your heart to deselect all node. Now click on the top node of the mirrored half your heart. Holding down the left mouse button drag it over the top node of the original half until you see the word Join and release the mouse button. Do the same thing for the bottom node. Click on the left center node and drag it in just a hair so that the left side matches the right side.

You now have a heart shape from an ellipse. You can stop now or continue reading to export the heart as a shape.

On your Layer Palette double click on Ellipse. This will open the properties window for the heart shape. Here I changed the stroke color to the same color as the fill color. I also changed the name to heart1zjh because when you export a shape although you can name the shape file when it is displayed in preset shapes it would say ellipse.

Click on your Object tool to select the heart. Click File>Export>Shape type in what you want to name it and click ok. Now if you click on your preset shapes tool you will be able to select your heart.

I hope you learned something from this tutorial.