Advice for drawing in MS PAINT

[Cosmonautical]

Okay, I just typed out this handful of tips for someone drawing in MS Paint. I've seen a lot of people try to draw in MS Paint before, and struggle, so I thought this forum could use a few directions for beginners. I wrote it indirectly for a friend, as the email is addressing someone else, so imagine we're talking about someone who's fairly unused to computers, and does not grasp a program's functions immediately.

Well, to start with, I know it's hard to visualize a picture so well before hand, but in old paint programs like that, color comes first + then lines! Otherwise, the black lines will likely have white dots all through them, and they can be really annoying. This is where the tool that looks like a paint bucket comes in handy, because once you've drawn your black line over a bit of misshapen color, you can use the paint bucket tool to change the color left outside the line to white or whatever your background color is. Try it out - the paint bucket tool is called "fill" because it fills the area you click with it.

Secondly, if he used MS Paint (It looks like he did) he can double-click the colors to change them into something he wants. Just need to remember to save as a 24-bit .bmp file rather than a 16-color .bmp, or it will screw up the colors when he saves! If he is using custom colors in the picture, and he has covered up a color on the palette that he's already drawn with another color, he should use the tool that looks like an eyedropper. Using that tool, you simply click a color in the picture that you've drawn with, and presto! you've selected that color and you can draw with it again. Make sure to switch back to the other tool you were using, or you'll just keep grabbing the color.

Thirdly, if he is just doing a black and white pic, or wants to do the lines before color, he should use the tool that looks like a paintbrush. It has a few varying sizes and shapes of "brush" to use. Once he is drawing with it, he should keep in mind that using the right mouse button will use the secondary color. The secondary color is white by default, you can change it by clicking with the right mouse button on the color you'd like from the palette. This is very useful, because you can use it to shape the lines that you have drawn into something more attractive.

Lastly, if he wants to color an image after he's drawn it in black and white, and there are little white dots in his lines that he wants to get rid of, he should look up in the VIEW menu, up where it says FILE EDIT VIEW IMAGE COLORS HELP. There is a ZOOM option there, which will amplify the image and make it easier to work with.

Something I didn't remember to say in this email was this: If you are planning on using color after you draw the lines- DON'T SCRIBBLE. Just take your time with the lines you're working with - there's an Undo function if you screw up. You can access it in the EDIT menu, or you can use the hotkeys (press CTRL and Z at the same time).

Hope that helps a few of you, or at least provides some interesting reading material for those of you who will never try to use Paint to eek out something worth looking at.

[Saria Dragon of the Rain Wilds]

My MS Paint skills are still lacking mightily. That's right. Mightily.

[Dylan]

Never use the pencil for outlines. Never. Why are you doing it? Stop it.

[Cosmonautical]

Originally Posted by Dylan

Never use the pencil for outlines. Never. Why are you doing it? Stop it.

I can't emphasize this one enough.

Originally Posted by Saria Dragon

My MS Paint skills are still lacking mightily. That's right. Mightily.

I've seen you do some amazing art, though. It really comes from practicing using the mouse for drawing. In short, play moar Mario Paint. OH YEAH.

[Zaden]

Otherwise, the black lines will likely have white dots all through them, and they can be really annoying....
...
Lastly, if he wants to color an image after he's drawn it in black and white, and there are little white dots in his lines that he wants to get rid of, he should look up in the VIEW menu

This crap happens every time I save and reopen a file and it's REALLY starting to piss me off. What's causing this and how do I murder it?

It seems to force you to add some kind of shading every time you save the file, and it does it to more than just my black lines. Check this out:

Look at the gray button on the "Call Shane" device. If you think your eyes are messing with you and you're on Internet Explorer, look at the lower right of your Explorer window and find the magnifier. You can clearly see that the gray button I drew is no longer even a gray button anymore. I drew that button in a SINGLE SHADE of gray, not gray and whatever that bastardized violet cancer is!

If I can't find a way around this whatever-it-is I'm going to ask you for an alternative to MS Paint, because it's making stuff that should take a few seconds take fifteen minutes. And the larger the picture I draw the more it gets screwed up. It screws it up right as I'm saving it, so there's no going back if I have to close the program.

Anything you can tell me to get around this will be appreciated.

[Kargath]

That's a JPEG compression artefact. JPEG images save disk space by throwing away information, and then using a complicated algorithm to reconstruct the picture. This works pretty well for photographs, but horribly for line drawings.
If you're working in paint, it's better to save your images as a Windows Bitmap (BMP) whilst you're working on it, and then once you're done save it as a PNG image.
If you have only a few distinct colours in your image, then save it as GIF instead. You get better compression. (GIF can only handle a few colours at a time)
The file type selector is underneath the filename entry field in the Save As dialog box.

[Ace Mercury]

I remember seeing a YouTube video of some guy/girl drawing a car in MSPaint. A couple of tricks I learned watching that video:

• You have two colours, one for each left and right mouse button
• You can pencil in outlines in grey (or some other unused colour) and then ink in some black lines over top of them. Floodfill the rest of the image alternating grey and white to remove all of the grey pencils.
• The spline tool is magical and no one can ever figure out how it works

You can see the floodfill trick at around 0:50" mark in the video:

Click to view video.

[Cosmonautical]

^^^ What Kargath said. JPEG is a perceptual image compression technique - never use it for works in progress, as it is a lossy format.

And GIF files are good for compressing low-color line-art, but the automatic save settings in MSPAINT do awful dithering. If you want to use the GIF format, save as a BMP or PNG file and resave it using an application like Photoshop that allows you to specify the amount of colors and the dithering procedures it uses.

[Luigiman7]

I am slow. I didn't know the right click thing. THIS HELPS SO MUCH

[Zaden]

THANK YOU, DUDES.

@Ace:
I already knew the floodfill trick for erasing. I figured it out myself! FUDGE, THAT GUY IN THE VIDEO'S GOOD. Which tool is the spline?

[Ace Mercury]

It's the one that makes a line, but then you can curve it. I think you have to understand how calculus works to use it.

[Zaden]

^Pfft. Just click, drag, and undo 'til you get the line you want.

[Ace Mercury]

Pfft. That's not knowing how it works. That's just brute forcing every single Bézier curve until you get something that sort of might maybe work sometimes.

[Cosmonautical]

Yeah, the Bezier's a total bitch to use. As a tip, if you can settle for a perfectly round line, use the circle tool for curves and erase the parts you don't want. For the more gradual curves, use the larger circles.

If you have trouble with estimating the distance from corner to corner you need with the circle tool when you're laying down the first corner(I know I do) just draw it as black line with white fill in a new window, and copy-paste it from there to your picture with the white fill set as transparent. You might have to trim up the line a bit before copying so you don't screw up your picture, but you can just rough that out.

[Ace Mercury]

I want to mention that there are a bunch of free drawing tools which are more powerful than MSPAINT. If you can't afford Photoshop, consider looking into Paint++, Paint.NET, GIMP, etc.

There's also a bunch of online graphics editors out there: Pixlr looks pretty awesome.