Hey, since I have nothing else to post about and I thought some of you might be interested, I decided to post a tutorial on how to make an icon. Hopefully with the help of my tutorial you can make icons like these!

You will need: MS paint/PSP and Animation Shop (Download a trial version here)

1. First of all open up your Animation Shop program. Go to >>File >> New>> and type in the measurments you want. a dialog box should come up that looks like this:

Simply type in the width and height you want. For an AIM icon, like we are about to make in this tutorial, your measurements will need to be 48 x 48. Once you have done that, click OK.

2. Okay, next step. There should be one little frame in your Animation shop. To make an animation you will need more than one frame. To make another frame, right-click on your current frame and click "duplicate selected". This will make another identical frame appear. You can duplicate the frame as many times as you want to get as many frames you want. You may also want to zoom into your frames by clicking the little magnifying glass icon on top. (If you have a mouse like I do, with a little wheel in between the two sides, you can just slide the wheel on your mouse.)

3. Okay so now you have the two frames or however many you wanted. Now you will have to draw stuff on it. To get colours, look for the palette (or colour-box lol) and click on the top box. Then you will have to choose whatever colour you want. Then you will have to draw stuff on the first frame!

4. Time to start drawing. I coloured my background black with choosing the colour black on the palette and flood-filling the thing black. The flood fill option should appear as a little paint-can on the top of your Animation shop, in between the eraser and big "A" which stands for text.

Then I started drawing the little hearts. You can draw the little hearts or whatever in PSP or paint because I like doing it that way, then pasting it in. (To draw stuff in directly on AS I use the paintbrush icon. If you don't want a huge line when you're drawing, make sure the width is set to "1" or "2".

If you want to add text instead of a drawing, just click on the "A" on top. Once that is activated click anywhere on one of your frames. a new dialog box will appear and you can choose your font and font size and stuff.

If you want to add dolls, you should edit the doll in PSP first. Make sure it's transparent. For a transparency tutorial, click here.

This is what I have drawn in. As you can see the second frame is still blank.

5. We will need to edit the second frame, so the icon will be animated. What I did with this icon is copied the first frame and then pasted it into the second frame. They're indentical, I know. Then I coloured the second frames heart's white, so that they look different.

It's staring to come together, isn't it? We're not done yet, though!

6. Now read carfully and don't make any mistakes because this is an important part! Okay. Left-click on the first frame and hold down the shift button on your keyboard. With shift still held down, left-click on your last frame. (In this case it's the second one). Next, right-click on the frames. Click on "frame properties."

7. This will bring you to a new dialog box. This box is where you can control how fast your icon flicks. For most icons "80" is a good speed, but for this particular icon I am sticking with "10". Don't be afraid to try experimenting with different speeds to see which one you like best.

This is what the frame properties box should look like. Once you have selected the speed you should click on "OK" to apply your changes.

8. Once you have selected your speed you will need to view your animation in action! To do so, click on the animation icon on the top of your screen. It looks kind of like a filmstrip.

Look for that icon and click on it.

9. The results. This is what the icon I have made looks like when I put it into motion, with a speed of "10".

Pretty eh?

10. Lastly don't forget to save it!!! To save it, click on >> File>> Save and then name it, choose the file type (.gif) and click OK.

Ahhh... finally done! LOL! If this tutorial has helped you in any way, or if you need more help, please comment!