---Blinkie Tutorial---

Want to learn how to make your own blinkie? It is easy once you learn how.

This is what you need:
- MS GIF Animator
- An image editor e.g: MS Paint
- Any program that supports .bmp -> .gif conversion if your paint program cannot save as a .gif

Okay, now you are ready to begin.

Step 1
Open your graphics software. You must create the images that will be used in your animation. First, make a string of blocks, shaded like this:

Step 2
Put letters in the boxes.
Your blinkie should now look like this:

Step 3
It is time to add an icon like this:
After you are done, it should look like:

Step 4
Now make a series of images like so: 

(One all coloured, one with each of the letters white, and then one all white).
We will call these A, B1, B2 and C respectively.
Save them as .gif images. It is important that all of these images are the same size.

Step 5: Animation
Open MS gif animator..

Click on the yellow folder to open your first image. This will be image A. For each additional image, click the piece of paper with the plus sign. To save, click on the icon to the far right which shows the pile of 'save' icons, this will save the whole animation.

Since this animator is strange, you have to enter the images in backwards order. I put mine in like this: C, A, C, A, B2, B1, A. This will make each letter flash once individually, and then the whole word flash twice.
Next, Clink on 'Animation' and set it to 'looping', 'repeat forever'.  Then click on 'Image'. you will have to set the duration for each image. This is how long it will stay before changing to another image. Mine are all set to 25. You will have to set this for each individual image.
If you want, you can set the transparency, but if you want to do this, then it is easiest to set the background of all the images to orange or some other colour that is not included in your blinkie. Then you can set orange to transparency. You must set transparency to each individual image also.

Now save. Your blinkie should look something like this:

You can try many different variations of this, but this is the basic idea.

Disclaimer: NEOPETS, characters, logos, names and all related indicia are trademarks of Neopets, Inc., © 1999-2009 www.neopets.com. Images used with Permission. Other Images by Jo Carter (unless otherwise attributed)