Paint Shop Pro and Smudging The retouch tool on Paint Shop Pro can be used to produce effects similar to the blending effects in encaustic art. This can be used to transform a simple piece of clip art into an effective graphic. As an example I took the pair of dancers from the MSOffice Clip art section and loaded it into PSP4. The dancers had the black block clipped from the bottom by selecting the area that was wanted and cropping the image (shift+R). Then a background was created for the pictures. A blue was chosen and the Flood Fill tool used with the sunburst option. Then the paintbrush was used and a small amount of blue painted along the bottom and interspersed with black. Smoke like effects can be created by using the retouch tool. Set the size to about 30, the type to smudge and the opacity to about 30. The cursor is then moved in small circles to blend the colors togethor. This very simple technique allows you to mimic the way hot wax is moved and blended by the iron. Encaustic Main Page On the Net Contact Elspeth Bracey: elspeth@eggsasperated.freeserve.co.uk