Mermaid

For this tutorial you will need the following:

Paint Shop Pro, I am using PSP X, you should be able to use any version.

Tube of choice, I am using the artwork of Elias Chatzoudis which you need a license to use.
I purchased my tube at PTE when he was there, he now has his own independent store.

Scrap kit of choice. I am using a PTU kit, Merfish by Pimp'd Designz

available at Pimp My Tags With Scraps 

Font of choice, I am using Impact & Beautiful ES

Plugins: No outside plugins needed

Just remember that my choices of papers and elements is just a suggestion, change it up and make it yours! You don't have to follow mine exactly.

Add a drop shadow of your choosing to tubes & elements throughout. I usually use 1, 1, 50, 5 unless otherwise noted.

Let's get started!

Open a new canvas 850 x 850 with a white background. 

We'll crop it at the end, this just gives room to work.

With the font set on Impact, type out the word MERMAID in all caps. Any color will work.

Now use your magic wand and click inside the letters

Open paper 13, copy and paste as a new layer, arrange in the letters, selections, invert

click delete on your keyboard.

You can also do this by setting the paper as your background by clicking background, go to patterns

and choose the open paper. I didn't do this though, because it will use the whole paper and I wanted to only use the darker portion at the bottom. 

Either way will work. It just depends on how you want it to look.

Selections, invert, modify, expand 3, 

add a new layer below the paper layer, flood fill with a color from your tube or kit. 

I used #5ca8dc from the mermaid's tail

Delete the first text layer we did.

on the blue layer, add/remove noise

add noise

uniform

monochrome

65%

merge the two text layers and add your drop shadow

Place your tube on top of the word

add your elements check my tag for when I placed them

sand, place on right, duplicate & mirror

water, place so it looks like it's dripping off her onto the word

fish, resize 40%

starfish 2, resize 35%

starfish, resize 30%

shell 2 resize 30%

coral, resize 30%

sand dollar, resize 30%

flower 2, resize 25%

crop & resize

add your copyright and credits

add your text and save