To Begin:

Open your PSP program. Make a new image, 300 x 300. Transparent background.
Open your preset shapes, set to rectangular. Antialized checked, style: filled, create as vector unchecked.
Draw a rectangle almost the width of your canvas, make the height about an inch high. The colour doesn't matter, as long as its a colour you can see. You will be changing the colour shortly.
Using your selection tool, and using rectangle, antialized checked, feather 0. Draw a rectangle around your image. Then click anywhere in the center to select it. Dancing ants should be surrounding your image:

Now go to your flood fill tool. Select linear gradient. Go to the second tab in psp6.
Click on edit, now at the top you should find the word new. Click this and type in rainbow or whatever you want to call this gradient. Now in the next section of this tab, there is a place to make new gradients such as the following:

Click on the squares that are below the bar, starting with the first of two shown. Change them to your favorite colours in the rainbow. To add more squares just click below the bar between the first and last squares. Once you have added at least 5 colours. Evenly space them along the bar. I used the psp colour palette to select my colours. Here are the following colours I used:

#1] #ffc0c0 #2] #ffffc0 #3] #c0ffc0 #4] #c0ffff #5] #c0c0ff

Then click ok. Then flood fill your rectangle. Deselect.
Now go to image, effects, noise in psp 7, or just image noise in psp6. Add a uniform amount of noise at 3%.

Now comes the fun part. Go to your plugins. Go to Mura Meister's Pole Transform. And apply.

Now go to your selections tool once more and using rectangle, feather 0 antialised checked. Draw a rectangle over the top half of your coloured partially completed rainbow. The following is what you should have:

Hit the delete key so that you have only half a circle. Select none.

Go to image flip. Now using your deformation tool, and moving only the side squares, move the sides of your rainbow in some.

Your rainbow is completed. I like to create a new layer and using the cloud tubes provided by jasc, add a cloud to each end of the rainbow. Chose a cloud you like and resize it by 50%. Go to your layer palette and duplicate, then go to image and mirror. Now something else I like to do, is brighten the cloud. I find the grey the tubes uses is too dull. Go to your colours, colourize..and change the colour of each cloud on each layer. Now you can merge this visible and save as a tube so you can use it over and over again!

If applying to a graphic, try making it transparent. Just go to the layer palette, and reduce the opacity on the layer you applied your rainbow to.

Now here is a slightly different rainbow. To create this, follow this tutorial down to where you add a new layer to add a cloud. Then apply the deformation tool. Holding down the shift key, move the bottom left side node up. Move the bottom right side node down. Add more noise at 3% uniform. There you go!

I hope you enjoyed painting rainbows!

If you need any help email me at: email!

To do the above card, using the rainbow, just click on the card!

Do remember my rules regarding the use of these tutorials. This tutorial is copywrited material. Under no circumstances can this tutorial be duplicated, redone or changed. Under no circumstances can it be sold for profit. The Tilly Garden owns the copywrite of this tutorial. All of my graphics are watermarked with a transparent watermark.