
Now I'm just playing around with shapes and colors. These fancy colored metallic balls might be good put in a tube and used to decorate a virtual Christmas tree. I got this idea from someone else's tutorial where they used the circle deformation, which I had never tried before. What a useful tool. Anyway, let's have some fun.


	First open a new image, 200 by 200, transparent background. Flood fill with a solid color. The blue I used is the blue that's fourth from the left in the regular palette. Now apply Effects/Blinds with 20 for the width and 50 for the opacity. Then adjust brightness and contrast using 10 for brightness and 25 for contrast. This is what it looks like at this stage. You can apply a Gausian blur of 1 now or after making it round and shading it.


	Now use the Circle deformation to make it round. Then resize to 90 % with the resize all layers box unchecked(left). Select all and then float to select just the ball. Apply the cutout effect with setting of 50, 65, -25 and -25. Adjust brightness and contrast, same as above settings(right).


	Last, but not least, apply the chrome effect. For this size, prepared as above, I found a flaws setting of 8 gave the best result. After chroming, adjust brightness and contrast again, same settings, once or twice, depending on the color and brightness after chroming. Here I applied the adjustment twice. You might try this with blinds settings of 40 for width and 35 for opacity for larger segments. I've made these in red, green, blue, silver and gold to use next Christmas. Experiment with other shapes and patterns. I think I'm going to try a vector graphics car in candy apple red metallic, with bright chrome bumpers and shiny black new tires with chrome hubcaps. Have fun.

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