Just what is a layer? Ok, to help you understand what a layer in a painting program is, lets visualize that you have drawn a house on a peice of paper.
   A layer is like a clear sheet of plastic that you might place on top of your peice of paper. If there isn't anything on that sheet of plastic, you can see right through it. But you know its there, because you put it there.
   If you then draw a tree on the plastic sheet, you can move it around on the landscape to suit yourself. Then you could put yet another plastic sheet over the first one, and draw a sun on that one.
   Obviously, you can move the sheets containing the tree and the sun over the top of the house, or each other, any way you like.
   You might decide you'd like to put the tree, the sun and the house under another a sheet of colored, but still transparent, plastic.
   Hopefully, that gave you the general idea of layers. You can do exactly the same things with layers using paint shop pro, and much more.

   Draw something on a blank black background image. I have used some flowers done with tubes from my tubes page. It really doesn't matter what you do here -- even a plain rectangle will suffice.

   First of all, have your layer control panel open, by clicking on .
   Now click on the icon represented below on the layer control panel.

   A large options screen will pop up. You need not change anything, just give that layer a new name to make it easier to identify. Where the text Layer 1 is highlighted next to Name, I have typed in Spider. The layer control panel now looks like this:

   As you can see the bar saying Spider is highlighted; that means that the Spider layer is the active layer, and anything done to the image will only appear on that layer. Now, click on the for the picture tubes.
   The menu for the picture tubes will now appear in the general options menu.

   Select Arachnophobia (or any other tube) and place one somewhere on the spider layer by clicking on the mouse only once. You can modify the size of the picture tube by clicking on the scale arrows (or type in a percentage). If you don't like what you did, hit ctrl + z keys to undo that action. Only the picture tube you layed down will dissapear, nothing else will be affected.

   To move the bug (if you want to) click on the mover tool , and place the cursor on the spider itself - then hold down the mouse button and drag the spider around.
   You can also choose to rotate the image. Go to Image Rotate, and enter in an angle you'd like to rotate it too. In a nutshell, you can do whatever you want! And until you move on to another layer, only the spider (or whatever tube you are using) will be affected.

   Just repeat the same steps like above, but rename this layer to something else. Click on another tube image - I will use the beetles tube as an example - and place the beetle on the new layer.

   If you let your mouse hover over the layer title bars (in the layer control panel), a small thumbnail of the contents of the layer will appear.
   Also if you want, you can use the mover tool to click on either of the insects and move them about. You will see the title bars move highlighter, because by clicking on the other images you change the active layer.

   Create another new layer, and name it Color. Your layer control panel should now look like this:

   Now choose the flood fill tool . Now, you must go over to the Styles menu on the left hand side, underneath the palette. Click and hold down on the top style box. A small menu will pop up, click on the one the picture shows. Then, just click once on the same style box, and a larger menu options box will pop up. Also go to the general options menu and change them to the same as it shows here.

   Now on the color palette, click on one color for your foreground (the top box) and a contrasting color for the background (the bottom box). These two colours will blend into each other in a circular sunburst gradient effect.

   You can also click the small arrow inbetween the two colors to swap them around. This would swap which color would appear on the outerside of the circle.
   Now, click anywhere on the new Color layer you just created. Everything beneath the Color layer will disappear under the sunburst gradient fill.

   Now, drag the opacity bar next to the color layer title in the layers control panel. You will notice that the lower you drag it, the more you can see through it, like a sheet of plastic.

   Now you want to move the color layer so that it is between the insects and the flowers, which means only the flower will be affected by the color change.
   To do this, place your cursor on the color layer's title bar in the layers menu box. Hold your mouse button down, and drag the bar; drop it betwee, the Bug and Background bars by releasing the mouse button.
   Now, for the fun part ;)

   Drag the color layer's opacity slider back to 100%. You will now see only a colored background with the bugs on top of it. The flower is only temporarily hidden beneath the other layers. You will see it again once you start changing the color layer's blend modes.

   Click on the words 'normal' and a menu will pop up with all the blend modes. Work your way down through the various modes in it. Each blend mode does a different thing to the colors on the layer beneath it. The best way to see what does what is to experiment. There is no simple way to explain the different effects but to experience them yourself with what they can do.

   Try clicking on and moving the bugs around some more. Change the bugs, add more bugs. Add some text to the background layer as I have done below -- try different colours. Add an Airplane or anything else you can think of!!! Generally mess with the layers until you are comfortable with how very simple it all is!

Merging the Layers

   When you are happy with your graphic, save it as a PSP file. The PSP formt will keep all the layering info so that you can later go back and change anything at that time.
   To save the imge for use on the web, you will have to combine, or Merge, the layers.
   Go to the text menu at the top of your PSP screen, and click on the Layers option. Select Merge all/Flatten will turn your image into a regular one-lyer "background" image -- you will see that the single layer is now entitled "background." You can reverse this process by double-clicking on the background title bar.
   Selecting Merge visible will combine your layers into a single transparency layer.

   Note : If you want to merge any number of individual layers during the course of constructing your graphic, you can do so by hiding the layers you do NOT want to merge. Hide these layers by "switching off" the visibility toggles for those layers -- i.e. click on the icon immediately to the right of the layer's label/name; the layer will become invisible until you click on its visibility toggle icon again. This is very useful if you want to keep your background layer and merge everything above it -- just temporarily hide the background, then merge the rest of the layers/visible. (Make sure you have clicked on one of the active layers, not the background, before merging.)

   That should be a clear explanation of layers, and I hope it was clearly written. I adapted this tutorial from ART DEPT - PSP Tutorials, except I tried to rewrite them so that younger people as well as older people might understand them. There is a lot more to PSP, but I definately don't want to write a whole book about it. Please, learn to experiment with the program on your own as well as seeking out tutorials on the net. PSP doesn't bite ;) And neither do its help files.