Filters: This tutorial can be completed without the Twirl or Eye Candy filters. I used my PSP Twirl filter (Effects>Distortion Effects>Twirl). The Gradient Glow is only used for the text and can be omitted as the glow effect is very subtle, or you can use Eye Candy 3 Glow.

Mask: If you have any trouble downloading the mask from 4shared, you can get it here.

My canvas size is 500x500.

For the BG2 layer, I used PSP Twirl (Effects>Distortion Effects>Twirl: 478 Degrees. Instead of using Enhance, I used Sharpen one time.

For the tube layers, I placed both of them above the BG4 layer rather than below it. When I placed them below I had dark swirls running over the face and body and it didn`t look right.

I didn`t like how the drop shadow looked on the BG1 layer, so I "outlined" my BG1 layer first. To outline the layer, I selected it (Selections:Select All/Float/Defloat), expanded the selection by 1 pixel, loaded the Flood Fill Tool (Match mode: None, Blend mode: Paint Behind, Opacity: 100), then filled the selection with a medium dark color. The drop shadow that I added is 2/2/50/3/#404040.

For my text, I didn`t have a place inside the circular area to put my text, so I omitted those steps from the tutorial and went my own way. I chose a medium thick script font, Rosarian (you can find fonts like this at Dafont in the Script>Calligraphy section). My text has four layers: stroke, fill, drop shadow, and glow.

1. For the stroke layer, I used a dark color with stroke=1.
2. For the fill layer, I selected an area of BG1 to use as fill. After creating a selection of the text I pasted the fill into the selection.
3. For the drop shadow layer, I created a "mock drop shadow" by duplicating the fill layer and moving it down below the fill layer, then offset it (Effects>Image Effects>Offset: 2, -2) and reduced the opacity to 50.
4. My text needed something to help it stand out against the background of the mask layers, so I created a "mock gradient glow" by adding another text layer below the drop shadow layer (very light color from the tube, stroke=6). I selected this light layer, contracted the selection by 1 pixel, inverted the selection then applied a gaussian blur of 1. The blurring creates a sort of glow effect but it`s mostly done to just soften the edge of the layer so it`s not so sharp.

For animation, I added Noise to the apple and some of the red drips (gaussian, 45, mono).

The font I used for the image credit is Lilabit Px.

The Animation Shop optimization settings that I used for the Colors tab are Optimized Median Cut and Error Diffusion.