Making a Perfect Arch - Corel Paint Shop Pro Tutorial

Donnamarie J. Walker March 28, 2002 1 Many of us enjoy making windows and archways with PSP and, for the most part, the way we've been taught how to make the arch shape, using circle and rectangle shapes, has been fine. But it's not been perfect so while playing with vectors, I found I could make a perfect arch using the Ellipse shape alone. Ready to try? We are going to do this in Paint Shop Pro 7 because it has the feature to enable you to export your shape so it's ready for you the next time you need it. This will be a Vector Shape, don't panic, it's pretty simple.   2 Open PSP and a new image 400 x 400. It's always a good idea to start work on a large canvas so you will have plenty of room to work. Select your Preset Shapes, Ellipse, and I am using White for my fill. I have my ruler option on and started the Ellipse at 100, 50 and drew it out to a size of 230 x 300. You can make yours whatever size you'd like. Place your cursor on the center of the Ellipse shape and move it until it is centered on the canvas.   3 On your tool bar, select Node Edit and move the left and right nodes up a little. Those are marked in red in the image below and will give you the "arch" shape. I then added the two nodes in blue. These will be our bottom corners. Not very straight are they? Let's fix that.   4 Right click on the left bottom node and convert to line. Move it to the left a bit so it lines up with the node above it. Now do the same for the right bottom node, moving it to line up with the right node above it. Now look carefully at the node lines while converting and moving to make sure they are straight and lined up as shown below. If you need to add a background to help you see what you are doing, do that, you can delete it later. Click on the center bottom node and convert to line.   5 Now I went up and gave that top node a little pull to stretch it out a bit but not much. It's up to you how "arched" you want your shape. Try to keep an eye on the arrow when pulling, keep its line straight on both ends.   6 Your shape is made so let's export so you will have it ready for any use. Each time you select the shape, choose create as a vector, too, so you can adjust it for your project. But, first, if you've added a background layer, delete it now. Ready? Go to: File> Export Shape> File Name> Arch> Click OK.   7 Now close PSP and go to the Cache folder in PSP 7, select all and delete. We are doing this so that when you open PSP 7 again and click the Presets Shapes, all will be loaded fresh, including your new Arch shape. You should empty this Cache weekly as it tends to get very large if you use PSP daily. That's it! I told you it was pretty simple! Hope you've enjoyed it!     Copyright 2002, Donnamarie J. Walker, All Rights Reserved