A Picture Tube allows you to paint using a customized image. This tutorial will show you how to create a picture tube and then apply it.

First go into the File Menu, choose Preferences, then General Preferences. Click Rulers and Units. Set the Grid options to: Units=Pixels, Horizontal Spacing=100, Vertical Spacing=100. Click the Change button in the lower right hand corner and change the Line Color to red. Click OK to accept the change, and click OK in the Preferences menu.

Next, open a new document 300 pixels wide and 300 pixels high with a transparent background. In the View menu, choose Grids to display the grid. Your image should look like this:

In creating the tube, you can use pictures, images, etc. I used four gifs of Christmas cats. (Make sure your images have a transparent background. See my Transparent Gif Tutorial for details.) Open your images, and using cut and paste (paste as a transparent selection) place one image in each of the nine squares in the grid. It should look like this:

If you want, you can add a drop shadow to the images. Click the Magic Wand tool on the tool palette, on the controls tab, set the tolerance to 1 and the feather to 0. Click the background of the image to select it, choose Invert in the Selections menu and the image should be selected. In the Image menu, choose Effects then Drop Shadow. In the Drop Shadow options menu, select color as Black, Opacity as 66, Blur as 4.9 and the Offset as 7 vertical and -7 horizontal.

Finally, select Export-Picture Tube from the File menu. In the Picture Tube menu, change the Cells Across to 3, Cells Down to 3 and the Step Size to 200. Type a name for your tube in the Tube Name box. That's it! Open a new file with a white background, click the picture tube button on the Tool palette, select the name of the tube you created and paint around your new image area.