Stained Glass FontPlay Instructions

I don't have a tutorial, but I can kind of explain what I did. I used this on these fontplays: Quintus StainedCameo, Gaposis Outline and Bartholomeow StainedGlass

  • I created a letter at 300 pt, regular not bold.
  • The letter looked to squat so I stretched it lengthwise (you probably
    have to uncheck the proportional resizing) until it looked right, doing this also made the openings larger.
  • Now I saved it as a black and white gif so that I could select the
    background between the grid (which is transparent) and change it to black.
    But keep the original transparent letter also.
  • Once the background in-between the grid lines is black copy it back to the transparent letter and place it on top of it and then flatten the 2 and apply a bevel or I found that Eye Candy's glass filter looked better.
  • Now collect your pictures you are going to use. You can do one at a time or have them all ready before hand. I just keep on looking one at a time. To figure out how big the pics are going to be I used 'Cool Ruler' http://www.fabsoft.com/pages/Downloads/Downloads.htm to measure the width and height of the opening and then shrink down the picture or cut out or crop the picture to slightly larger than that size.
  • Now place the picture behind the opening, you might find that the opening you had in mind is not the one you want to use so just move the picture around until it looks right.
  • Save after every addition, saves a lot of frustrations if things don't go according to plan.
  • Keep on repeating this until all the openings are filled.
  • You might have to send some pictures to the back when there is an overlap or erase the part that is intruding into another picture.
  • Group everything together and save with all the layers intact.
  • Now flatten the picture and save again as a new picture. That way you can always go back and make changes.


Hope this explains it.

PS. I don't use Paint Shop Pro or Photo Shop, I still use MS Image Composer, and only have a rudimentary knowledge of manipulating the layers in those programs.