lovespoontut

I adore traditional hand carved wooden "Love Spoons" of Wales, and have wanted to make a graphic of one for ages. I couldn`t find any tutorials anywhere, and can`t afford a real one so I can tube a photo of it!- So I decided to try and make one from scratch, and was pleasantly surprised with myself when I finally made one!. Love Spoons are traditionally given to someone you love, and can have any number of designs and symbols on them, meaning different things. Having made my first digital version, it occurred to me that others might also want to have a go, and so this tutorial was born...

Before we begin, you will need my loving spoon selections, my wooden bead tube and my wood fill tile...You can download the zip file HERE. Unzip the tube into your tubes folder, the tile into your patterns folder and the selections into your selections folder.
Ready??? lets carve our spoon...

We will be making a large spoon because there is some tricky and intricate "carving" involved.
you can resize to your taste once done, and they decrease better than enlarge!

Start a new image as in fig 1.

Go to selections / load from disk and open the ""spoon.sel".
Set your foreground colour to pattern and choose my kkwood3 tile
or any other vertical wood grain. Apply as in fig 2.

Click on your flood fill tool, click inside the selection to fill with wood grain,
then deselect. Go back to selections and open the "handlehole.sel" the hit delete.
Now go effects / 3D effects / outer bevel and apply as in fig 3.

Deselect then go back to selections and open the "bodyinner.sel".
Go back to effects / 3d effects / inner bevel and repeat the last application then deselect. Now go back to selections and open the "heart.sel", hit delete
then go effects / 3D effects / outer bevel and apply as in fig 4.

Go back to selections and open the "heart2.sel" and hit delete
then repeat the last outer bevel and deselect. Go back to selections and open the "beadouter.sel" then hit delete. Go back to effects / 3D effects and apply outer bevel as in fig 5 then deselect.

Go back to selections and open the "dragon.sel", now go effects / texture effects / emboss, then flood fill the selected dragon with the wood grain. Now go colours / adjust / highlight-midtone-shadow and apply as in fig 8 then deselect.

Next go back to selections and open the "horseshoe.sel". Repeat the emboss,
flood fill and colour adjustment steps as for the dragon,
then go effects / 3D effects / drop shadow and apply as fig 9 then deselect.

Next go back to selections and open the "daffodil.sel", repeat the emboss,
flood fill and colour adjustments as for the dragon then deselect.
Go back to selections and open the "chain.sel" and flood fill with the wood grain.
Now go effects /3D effects / inner bevel and apply as in fig 10 then deselect.

Next go edit / copy, then edit / paste as new layer (twice)
and position the two beads above the original as in fig 13.
( you can add as many beads as you like that will fit, but note,on a real loving spoon, these "balls" represent the number of children you either have or intend to have!!!)

Now go layers / merge / merge visible.
Click on your magic wand tool then use it to select the outside of the spoon,
then go selections / invert to select just the spoon.
Next go effects /3D effects / inner bevel and apply as in fig 14 then deselect.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial which was written for PSP 7,but should adapt for other versions.

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