This week we had no less than four lessons. The first was to make sparkles which we were then to provide on our web pages for people to download! Here is the one I made for the class tutorial along with its Zip file - just click on the images to download by the way.

Homework Part 1 was to make three sparkles, zip them up and provide them to share with the class for download. Here are mine - just click on the images to download the Zip files, then open the sparkles in Paint Shop Pro and tube them up!

For Part II we were to make pictures with animated sparkles - using, of course, the sparkles we made in Part I. The first picture is one we made in last term's class and I figured it would be fun to use for a simple animation.

Next I made a sparkle scene using the same picture on which Tugs was featured. It is in fact the beach as you walk down to Dunwich on the south eastern coast of England. I have to say that in real life Tugs would have had a lead on because the cliffs are so dangerous there - you have to keep well away from them - but that's another story. Here I decided to make the sea water sparkle and I think it's quite successful.

Finally I thought it would be fun to use the sparkle to animate a sunset scene which I obtained from the free graphics archive of my web host, www.oneandone.co.uk as they have given me permission to use their graphics for this purpose as long as they were given credit.

Next step in Homework was to make some glitter animated text and change the glitter buttons to provide new ones for download. I played with the Hue/Colour/Saturation Adjustment Layers for the glitter buttons which you are welcome to download and use, and found that if you duplicated the adjustment layer that changed the colour again quite unexpectedly.

The final exercise was to make an animated button followed by a minimum of three animated buttons linked to your Table of Exercises. First of all, here's my animated button done in class:-

And here are my animated buttons done as homework - I did a full set instead of just three! Please note only Weeks 1 and 2 are active at present.

In the Saturday session we made fireflies and I animated a quilt I made.

Here's a picture of the full sized quilt on exhibition at the Alexandra Palace, London in the Knitting and Stitching Show in 1998. The quilt contains over 4,000 1 inch hexagons and was made using the English Paper Piecing method. It is hand pieced and hand quilted.

This picture was meant to be displayed on a white background. I redid the animation to show the effect as it should be. However the selection should have had a soft edge and I'm not happy with the effect of the "jaggies". It would I think look nice set in to the top left hand corner of a page as a single background image using Cascading Style Sheets .