If you wish to download this tutorial to work offline, you can download the zip file here (368K). Extract all the files in the zip to the same folder on your hard drive, and load index.html into your browser.

A dream catcher is a Native American artefact - for filtering your dreams! It consists of a wooden hoop, with a woven string web inside it, and the hoop is decorated with strings of beads or feathers. The idea is that if you hang it by your bed, bad dreams will be caught in the web and the good dreams allowed to pass through the centre circle.

You will need a wood fill pattern. I get mine from
http://www.grsites.com/textures/wood001.shtml
This is the first of several pages of wood textures to choose from.

You will also need a greyscale herringbone texture. I suggest that you make one using the Jama 3d filter, and I shall show in the tutorial how this is done. You can download the filter, which is freeware, from
http://www.mtu-net.ru/redfield/

We begin by making the hoop and web. In Paint Shop Pro open a new image 400x400, 16.7 million colours, 72pixels/inch, colour black. You will need to use the Layer Palette and the Control Palette, so on the View Menu choose Toolbars and make sure that those two are checked.

Open your wood texture in PSP. Set the foreground colour to a dark brown shade by using the eyedropper colour picker tool. Left click with this tool on a dark shade in your wood.

On the layer palette, click on the add a layer button. In the dialogue box which appears type 'Hoop' to name the layer, and OK it.

Use the shape drawing tool and set the control palette as shown on the right. Put your cursor at 200,200 (the position is displayed on the status bar at the bottom left of the workspace) and click and drag till almost to the edge of the image, so that you have a big brown circle for the hoop.

Use the magic wand set the tolerance on the control palette to 100, and click on the brown of the circle so it is selected. Use Selections/modify/contract set at 2 followed by Selections/modify/feather also set at 2.

Use the fill tool and on the control palette set the fill style to pattern, the tolerance to 20, the opacity to 100 and the match mode to RGB. Click the options button, use the arrow beside Current pattern to get the list of images you have open, and select your wood texture. OK that and click with the fill tool in between the two selection marquees (marching ants) to fill your hoop with the wood. Use Selections/select none, and your image should now look like this.

On the next page we will make the string web.