Making A Mug

I was trying to come up with something I could make as an adoptable for one of my online groups and my inspiration had totally deserted me.  Then my hubby suggested making a mug so I gave it a try and after playing around for a while, I eventually came up with something that kind of almost nearly resembled a mug!  This is how I did it!

By following this tutorial you'll get this mug:

You will need:

A copy of PaintShop Pro - you can download a 30 day trial version from here

These shapes - unzip them and put it in your "shapes" folder in your PSP directory.  You may need to restart PSP before they show up.

Open up a new image at the following settings:

Width: 300 pixels
Height: 300 pixels
Resolution: 72.000 pixels per inch
Transparent background
16.7 million colours (24 bit)

Go over to your Colour Palette and choose a colour for both the foreground and the background - it works best if the 2 colours are in the same base colour - I've chosen blue for mine.  The colour at the top will be the outline of the mug and for the handle, so it's best to make that the darkest colour and then the bottom one slightly lighter.

Select your shapes tool

In your Tool Options window, use the following settings:

"Cylinder" shape
Retain Style NOT checked
Antialias checked
Create as vector checked
Line width 10

Then draw a shape that looks something like the main part of a mug - this is what mine looks like:

Deselect (Ctrl + D)

Save your work as a .psp file

Now go back up to your Tool Options window and change the settings to this:

"Ellipse" shape
Retain style NOT checked
Antialias checked
Create as vector checked
Line Width 20

Now go back to your colour palette and remove the background colour (the lightest one, on the bottom - click and hold  on the colour and when the pop-out box comes up, choose the circle with the line through it)

Go back over to your mug and draw a handle on it.  I find it easiest to start almost at the top of your mug and draw down from there until you are almost at the bottom - we can adjust it so that it looks better in a minute

DO NOT DESELECT!!

Save your work again, still as a .psp file

It's starting to look a bit like a mug now!  Yay!!  The handle doesn't look quite right though, so let's change it.

You will notice that there's a box around the outside of your handle with 3 little squares on each side of it... this is how we are going to adjust the handle.  

If your handle looks too big, click and drag the boxes in the middle of the top and bottom of the big square:

If your handle looks too wide, click and drag the boxes in middle on the left and right hand side of the big square:

This is what mine looks like now:

Save your work again - yep, you guessed it!  As a .psp file!

Hmmm.  The handle still doesn't look *quite* right... it looks like it's going to fall off at any second!!  Your handle will probably look out of position too, so if it does, this is what you need to do...

Right in the middle of the big square, you'll see another small square - that's the one we're going to be using to change the position of the handle:

Hover your mouse over it and your cursor will change to a cross with 4 arrows - I can't describe it very well... try it and see!  <g>

When you've got this cursor, click and drag your handle into the position you want on the side of youru mug.  This is what mine looks like:

Deselect your handle (Ctrl + D) and you've finished!!

Save your mug as a .psp file and you'll have a template mug

Now you can crop off any wasted space and decorate it any way you want to!  This is what my finished mug looks like: