Making a Basic Twinkle Tube

This one's extremely easy!

This tutorial gives some basic techniques that can be used for making your own twinkles or sparkles for tubes.  Once you have the general idea, use simple math/s to vary your results, such as the relative height of the vertical and horizontal spokes, the number of spokes etc.  You will need to experiment to get the perfect twinkle!

Open a new square image, with the proportions you favour -- here I have used 250*250 -- with a black or other dark background to work against.  Set your foreground colour to the colour you want for your twinkle.

Open the layers control panel and create a new layer by clicking on the "new layer" icon at bottom left.

On the new layer, place your cursor at the exact centre (125*125) and draw a horizontal ellipse in the color you want, using the "shapes" tool from the left-hand toolbar.  Check the antialias box in the , antialias on.

A combination of the width of this ellipse and the percentage of deformation in the next step will affect the ultimate width of your twinkle's spokes and you can adjust both accordingly.

Go to the Image menu. 

Select Deformations, then Perspective Horizontal. 

(I use Horizontal because there is a tiny bug in the vertical perspective -- JASC are aware of this and say they will fix it for the next patch.)

Set the slider to 100% and click OK.

Mirror the image (Image/Mirror) and repeat Step 2.

Go back to the Deformations menu.  
This time use a lower percentage, depending on how fat or thin you want your twinkle's spokes to be.  (Here I have used 80% for the second set of deformations.)  Mirror and repeat.
For a finer twinkle, use 90% or so.
(Obviously you can bypass a step or two by doing all horizontal deformations before mirroring then repeating the deformation steps you did.  I did it this way to illustrate the results better.)

Copy the layer (Edit/Copy) and Paste as a new layer. Rotate the image 90 degrees. (Image, Rotate.)
You paste this same image each time because copying and pasting the rotated layers will gradually lessen the quality of new rotations.
For the purpose of simplifying this very basic tutorial I have used the same length for both spokes.  It's generally much better, though, to make the vertical spoke quite a bit longer than the vertical spoke. If you don't get the relative width of a longer vertical spoke quite right, you can fine tune it using the pinch deformation.

Paste again as another new layer.   This time rotate the layer right by 45 degrees.  (Check the "free" option in the rotation popup.)
If you want to make the spoke a little smaller than the horizontal and vertical spokes, go to Image/Resize. 
Uncheck "resize all layers" and enter a percentage for the reduction.   Here I have used 80%.

Paste a final layer and rotate it right by 135 degrees.

On the layers control panel, drag the background layer title bar into the trashcan.

Go to Layers, and select Merge, Merge Visible.

Zoom your image right up by right clicking on it with the magnifying glass selected, and, with the paintbrush tool, carefully paint out the greyish pixels in the centre of your star.

Colorize the basic twinkle any way you like.  For a very bright white twinkle, select Brightness, Contrast from the Colors Adjust menu, and use maximum whiteness and brightness.

If you want to enhance the twinkle with a halo, create a new layer.  Drag it below the "merged" layer and spray a circle or two of a suitable colour using the spray tool. (The colours used here are exaggerated to illustrate the idea.)
To turn your star into a usable single sparkle or twinkle :
Delete the background layer and merge the remaining layers visible.
Go to the File menu and choose Export, then Picture Tube.  Enter a name for your twinkle.  
That's it!  It will now be on your tubes dropdown menu and can be resized on the tubes control panel slider.

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