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You will need the Jasc rope tube and the color chart I have provided.
Right Click and save the following image to your hard drive

Open a new image 400 X 400 pixels, transparent background.

Create a new layer and activate the selection tool, set to:
rectangle
feather 2
Antialias unchecked

Draw a rectangle approximately 200 wide by 50 high

Flood fill with the dark red color from the color chart (or color of your choice).

Do not deselect yet. Activate your drawing tool with these settings.
Single Line size 3
turn off background color
change foreground color to tan from color chart

Draw random lines inside the selected area. Don't worry if you go outside the lines
a bit, we'll fix that in a minute. The lines need not be perfectly straight,
they can go a little on the diagonal...play with it and have some fun.
You'll want to do something like this:



Now you'll need to go to Selections - Invert- delete. Do not deselect yet.

Next, you're going to go to Selections - Invert

Then, Selections - Float.

Ok, we need to give our firecracker a bit more rounded appearance by going:
Effects - 3D effects - cutout
Opacity 65
Blur 20
Horizontal & Vertical 2

Apply the cutout again, except this time change the H & V to -2 (minus 2)

Deselect.

Add a new layer and follow the same steps as above for your blue firecracker.
You are welcome to create different colored firecrackers. If you want a different
color for each firecracker, you will need to make 6 of them.
If you want just the blue and red, you only need to make one of each color.

With your firecrackers all made, I resized all layers by 75%.
I did NOT sharpen or merge the layers.

Open another new image 300 X 400 pixels, transparent background.

Copy the red firecracker from your first image and paste as a new layer
on your new image. Name this layer red1.

Duplicate your red1 layer twice, naming one red2 and the other red3.

Go back to your first image and copy the blue firecracker and then paste as a new layer
on your new image. Name this layer blue1.

Duplicate blue1 layer twice, naming one blue2 and the other blue3.

Now the fun begins! WoooHoo!!! You first need to place the layers in the order
as is shown in the following screen shot.



Time to rearrange and rotate our firecrackers. I am going to leave this entirely up to you.
Using the Image-Rotate feature in PSP, rotate the firecrackers
starting with blue1 layer either right or left, using the
settings you feel looks best. Go ahead and play with it until you are happy
with how it looks and then move the firecrackers into position so it
looks like they are over top of one another.

Now that we have our firecrackers in position, all rotated and sitting pretty
we're going to add our fuses. I didn't add the fuses previously because I wanted each one
to have a tad bit different look to their fuses.

Ready? Here we go......
Activate Layer1 and add a new layer.
Activate your rope tube and set the size to somewhere between 25-35%.
Play with the percentage to your liking.
On your new layer, draw a small line coming out of one side or the
other of your red1 firecracker. Go ahead and play with it till you are happy
with the way it looks.

Well, I don't know about you, but that yellow color of the rope tube just doesn't
go with the image, so I colorized it to make it look
more like a fuse.

Colors - Colorize
Hue 21
Saturation 47
Click OK.

Turn off all layers except your new layer and red1
Merge - Visible
rename the merged layer red1

Add fuses to the rest of your firecrackers, remembering to
colorize and merge - visible, then renaming each layer

We're almost done!

Activate Layer1 and using the rope tube, same settings as you used before
draw in the piece that appears to hold the firecrackers
together. You can be creative with how you draw this
Remember to colorize the tube, same as before.

Now we need to add some depth to the images.
On every layer apply a drop shadow with these settings:
Opacity 100
Blur 10
Vertical -1 (minus one)
Horizontal 0

That's all folks! You are all done!

Now you can add a backgound, add a border, turn it into wallpaper, whatever
you would like to create with your new image.

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