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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 200 X 400 pixels, transparent background.

Create a new layer and activate the selection tool, set to:
rectangle
feather 0
Antialias unchecked

Draw a rectangle approximately 80 pixels wide and 250 pixels 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 10
turn off background color
change foreground color to tan from color chart

Draw about three 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.

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

Deselect

Activate your selection tool again, same settings as before.
Zoom in real close and at the top of your red and white image, add a selection
same width as your first rectangle and about 40 pixels high.

Flood fill with the blue from the color chart

Deselect Activate your preset shapes tool.
Star, Antialias Selected
Shut off foreground color
Change background color to the tan color from the color chart

Draw three small stars on the blue

We need to chop off a bit of the bottom of our image to make it appear a bit more rounded.
Activate your selection tool set to ellipse. Starting from center of image
pull up on the selection tool and then pull out to the side until you have
something that looks like this:



Selections - Modify - Feather 2

Selections - Invert - Delete

Select all, then select your firecracker image and 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.

Create a new layer and drag it below your firecracker.
Activate your rope tube and set the size to somewhere about 35%.
Play with the percentage to your liking to create a fuse for the firecracker.
On your new layer, draw a small line coming out of the top of the 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.

Create a new layer on top of the firecracker.
Select your preset star image same settings as before.
Draw a star at the tip of your fuse.

Select the star & float, then apply some color with the airbrush one spritz with blue,
then one spritz with red. Use the following settings:



Effects - 3D effects - cutout
Opacity 65
Blur 20
Horizontal & Vertical -2 (minus 2)

Defloat, then add drop shadow...
Opacity 100
Blur 20
Vertical 0
Horizontal -1 (minus one)

Deselect

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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