Please do not re-post this tutorial anywhere, without my expressed permission.

FYI, I used Adobe Photoshop for this tutorial. I have not tried it on PSP, but it'd probably work. MSPaint will not work with this tutorial. Sorry.

And now, on with the tutorial! We're going to make a two-toned palette!

- Firstly, open Photoshop (or your program of choice). Open a new document, and set the width to about 70 pixels, and height around 50 pixels (height doesn't really matter, but you'll want to see how your colors blend together) in RGB Color mode, with no background (transparent). Once you have it open, create four new layers.

- Select the bottom-most layer, and floodfill (paint bucket) it with your lighter color. Now, switch to your darker color, select the next layer up, and change the Paint Bucket to the Gradient Tool. On the toolbar, change the gradient picker to 'Foreground to Transparent'. Mouse back over to your canvas, and starting from the right side, gradient fill the whole thing. Make it as even as possible! You should have something that looks like this:



- Now, go to your Color Picker, and choose a deeper tone of your current color. Select the third layer, and gradient fill this one as well, but only going about halfway across the canvas.

- repeat the above step, but now using your lighter color's lighter tone, and going from left to center on your 4th layer. You should have something like this:



- Almost done! Now, if you feel as though your lighter and darker tones are well, too bright and too dark, you can moove them off the canvas a little until you deem them perfect.

- Now, go to Image, then Image Size. Make sure the Constrain Propostions is ticked off. Set your height to 1 pixel, and your width to 7 or 8, and hit OK.

- Now you have this teeny tiny little image:



Select all of it, and under edit, select Copy Merge. What I usually do here is take the image to MSPaint, paste it, enlarge as much as I can, and then use the eye dropper and paintbrush to make the palette visible/bigger, like so:



There you have it :) My ghetto palette tutorial! Alternativily, you can use the same methods to create regular color palettes as well. Please let me know what you think of it, as this is the first tutorial I've ever written!

-emiko
emiko42@gmail.com
Pixel Kisses