Simple Spheres

This tutorial was created in PSP7.

1. Open an image, transparent, about 500x500 to give you some room to work. With your selections tool choose ellipse and draw an ellipse in the center of your image. Flood fill it with the gradient, or pattern of your choice. I've used my own gradients, angle = 50, repeats= 0. You can find my gradients here.

2. Go to Effects ->Noise -> Add 10%, uniform.

3. Go to Effects ->Geometric ->Twirl -450 degrees. Keep selected.

4. Go to Selections ->Float. Go to Effects -> 3D -> Cutout using these settings: offset v=-11, h=13, opacity=60, blur=53, fill interior color UNchecked. Ok.

5. To create some more depth add a new raster layer. Again using your selections tool draw a small ellipse near the top left. Floodfill it with white. Deselect. Go to Effects -> Blur and apply a gaussian blur radius 10. Image -> Rotate 45 degrees left. Merge layers visible.

Here are some spheres I made, some using gradients and some using patterns.