PSP Lesson 4

Welcome to MJ's Graphic Garden. What will you find here?
Pictures of peonies, perennials, flower bed color schemes, gardening tidbits, and sources for peonies on the web. And ~ ~

Paint Shop Pro tubes and buttons made from these flowers. like the graphic at the top of this page, or the iris at the side, can be found here.

PSP Lesson 4: This page is part of a home page I made for a Dreamweaver class I'm taking right now, but I've made changes on it to adapt it to lesson 4. It doesn't have all the navigation buttons I made on it, but you can see them at the links shown just below.

The above Blade-Pro peony is actually an image map.

Click on the portion that says "PSP Tubes" on mouseover, to see a page done in a grey color scheme, with a side navigation bar of snowglobe buttons. These buttons were about 2,500k each before I reduced colors using optimized median cut.

Click on the portion that says "Peonies" on mouseover, to see almost the same layout done in green. These snowglobe buttons were saved with even fewer colors, and without the gold stand at the bottom, so are smaller.

For the image map, I used a peony graphic altered with Blade Pro, size 139 w by 144 h. Using File | Preferences | Grid, I set the vertical grid to 48 pixels and the horizontal grid to 69. This visually divided it into 6 equal parts, each about 69w by 48 h, just to make it easier to see what I was doing. Next I chose the selection (rectangular) tool: clicking on it twice pulls up the custom choice screen. That allows you to chose each of the 6 areas separately and exactly, by choosing exactly where each section begins and ends. One by one, I made each selection a new image (hit control-c then control-v). Then exported each new image as transparent gifs.

I put the 6 gifs in a table with 3 rows, and attached an A HREF to each of them. I think it could have been done just as easily using div align=center instead of a table, but the table allowed me to change the background color.

You can also use a freeware program called Shoestring's picture dicer which you can obtain here. I'm hoping this is still the right url. If not, search for shoestring dicer. It was basically designed to help people slice up an entire web design into small sections for borders, etc.

The Snowglobe Navigation Buttons on the peonies and tubes pages were made using a tutorial I found on line. If anyone is interested I will find the URL. It should be somewhere in my massive and messy favorites file.

If you want to see the animated bird, which is not all that great :), it's hiding at the bottom of the page.

I also thank both Lori and Mike, who has this tutorial on his site, for their instructions on making cutout text used in the MJ Graphic Garden logo at the top.


*Colors In the Garden*


*Some Good Blues*

*Some Good Pinks*


*Companion Plants* for the peony or any perennial garden, by blooming season or by color. And, you can grow two or more plants in the same space!