How are templates made from scratch,nothing fancy though,just the basics?

Also Im putting in something photoshop related.

How do I make my own banners/and animated character's using photoshop?

Templates in general, or templates for forums? i have a different approach for both.

With general templates, i will start with a blank page thats about the right size, i personally start with something thats about 700 x 1400 that gives me room to add a background for the page, and room to strech down the page. Then i start at the top, find colours that go together well and just work from there. but with templates everyone works in a different way.

Tempaltes for forums, well its been a while for me, but what i tend to do is start with a psd of a existing template, such as phpbbs subsilver, that way i know it will be eas to slice up to match the tempalte, then make any smalltweaks later.

Animated banners, well then you really want to use Image Ready, if you have it, you can jump to if from inside photshop, so you can edit the pictures in photoshop, and then bring them back to image ready to animate them.

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Ya Ive got Imageready.I'll let you know incase Im stuck.Cheers.

as said you want to make a blank document in photoshop but before you start i suggest that you have a fair idea of what you want it to look like also when animating its good to use image ready as yuo caonnot make animations in photoshop you need to do it frame by frame in photoshop.

Well, definitely check out www.good-tutorials.com. It's by far the largest Photoshop tutorial database on the web. I'm sure you can find all the tutorials you need.

Also, I'd like to point you towards my forum. It's full of digital artists who specialize in Photoshop and Flash. We have a help section and a bunch of original tutorials, the count is at 52 for Photoshop alone right now.

Just click the first link in my signature.

Oh and for making templates, I usually start with a blank 800x600 page. I try to make my websites compatible with 800x600 or higher.

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