This is an easy-to-animate tag, but if you prefer, you may simply place the spiders where you like them and flatten the image. The tube I used is Bella, an HD image by Ishmael Rac-you must have a licence to use his wonderful art.
This tutorial was written using Paint Shop Pro 9 and Animation Shop 3.
Open a new raster image, 800x800. We'll resize later. Floodfill the layer with white. From the kit, open paper 3, copy & paste as a new layer. Resize by 60% and move to the upper left corner. Open frame-1, copy and paste as a new layer. Resize the frame by 80% and move slightly down and right. Open paper 4--go to your materials pallette and set the paper as your background pattern. Hide the foreground palette. Using your preset shapes, draw a circle a little larger than the frame. Convert to raster, move layer down and center below frame. Add a simple inner bevel to this layer. Open the web element, copy and paste as a new layer, centered under frame. Erase all of the bits of the web that extend beyond the purple layer. Open stars, copy and paste as a new layer, move to the upper left--see my tag for reference. Open the circle element, copy and paste as a new layer and center around the frame. Open Halloween wordart, copy and paste as a new top layer. Resize by 90% and position at the bottom, overlapping the frame slightly.
Open your tube of choice, copy and paste as a new layer. Arrange tube so that the hair hangs below the frame. Duplicate the tube layer, and move the duplicate layer down below the frame layer. Click back onto the top tube layer and carefully erase unwanted bits of tube at the bottom. If you are using the RAC tube that I used, the hair is on a seperate layer, so you can erase all of the bottom and then paste the hair on next as a new layer. Add a drop shadow of 3, -3, 50, 5, black to all layers and merge all layers.
Open the spooky-spider-2, copy and paste as a new layer and resize by 30%. Duplicate once or twice and place the spiders where you would like them. Place the spiders at the lowest points they will drop to. If you need a longer web string, just make a selection of the string and copy and paste it as a new layer and move it under the string you need to lengthen.
IF YOU WANT TO RESIZE YOU TAG, DO IT NOW--resize all layers
Once the spiders are positioned, merge all layers, copy and paste as a new animation into Animation Shop. Back to PSP--unmerge/undo, move the spiders up slightly,erase the extra bit of webs, merge all layers again, and copy. In Animation Shop, paste BEFORE current layer. Back to PSP, unmerge/undo, move the spders up a little more, remove the extra bits of web again, and repeat the 'paste before current layer' in Animation Shop. Repeat these steps until the spider have no web left to erase--my tag is 7 total frames. In Animation Shop, go to Animation>Frame Properties. Select the first frame and set the frame speed to 30. Click okay. Click on the last frame of the tag, go back to Frame Properties, and set the frame speed to 60. The remaining frames should all be set to 10.
Add the artists copyright info and your name and save as a .gif.
