Create a shield bubble around the image of the fighter.
There are various ways to do this. The example below is the way I most commonly use these days.
A shield bubble should be slightly form fitting, but only slightly, or it will look stupid. On the other hand, avoid
perfectly spherical or rectangular shield bubbles as well, as they also look stupid. Use
your creative skill here, it's the only opportunity you'll get doing interface art.
- To ensure symmetry, we will create half the shield bubble and then combine a mirrored duplicate with the original.

- Move the nodes around and alter the way the edges curved at them until the fighter image is nicely encased. Play with this until it looks good: a few moments here will have a large impact on the quality of the final ani, and will save you starting from scratch if you don't like it. Remember, too close-fitting a shield looks bad, but you do want it to reflect the fighter's shape somewhat.

- Make a mirrored duplicate of the half-bubble. Turn on Snap to Objects if it isn't already, and then drag the mirrored half-bubble into position. The two half-bubbles should snap together nicely. (Of course, this whole step is to be skipped on an asymmetrical ship.)

- Combine the two half bubbles into one object (Arrange Menu > Combine). Then join the overlapping nodes together to make a closed curve.

- Once the shield bubble has been shaped, copy and paste it back into the image, and then
resize the pasted version smaller until it fits just barely around the edges of the fighter.
Give it a black fill, and the original version a white fill. Then turn off their outlines.

- Use the Blend tool on the two shield bubble blobs to make a nice fade from white to
black.

- Right now your shield bubble is in one single piece. We will fix that next. Copy the
Blend group to the clipboard, and head back to Photo-Paint.
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