I've learned tons of great MSPAINT techniques that you might not have known. No, not the HOLD SHIFT FOR STRAIGHT LINES or the HEY THIRD COLOR! Some are from other places and some are from figuring them out, but either way, I'll be showing tons of them.
OBVIOUS: CUSTOM BRUSH
Make a small picture, select it, and drag while holding shift. Simple.
EASY, KEY-BASED SCALE
Using ctrl + plus or minus lets you scale an image with the keyboard, and also doesn't have antialiasing. At least not for me.
EZ-GRID
Hit ctrl+G. This puts a grid on the border of the pixels when zoomed at 6x or higher. does NOT add a grid to the picture itself, though.
VERY SIMPLE: 10x ZOOM
Want to zoom past 8x? Click the little light line below 8X:
WIERD: SPRAYCAN DOOM
Spraycan gets boring and crappy fast. When you're using it, hold down ctrl+numpadplus or minus, and it enlarges the radius of the spraycan gradually as you hold down on the mouse.
This will actually work with anything, including paintbrush. You can get it to be ANY size you want.
BLENDINATION
Blend images at photoshop (yet still basic) quality!
Find two images, and enlarge them by 2x.
We'll use these:
Just... pretend those are at 2x scale for now.
Now, make sure they are both the same size.
At this point, we need to make a dithermask. Make a new picture, the same size as the images, and create something like this:
It is a field of alternating pixels, which are white and some obscure yellow.
Your mask must not be doubled in size.
Now, copy that onto the first image, and make sure that white is set to transparent when pasting.
Now, create a new copy of your dither mask, and flip it by X or Y.
Do the same pasting process as before over the second image.
Now it gets a bit tricky. Copy the first image (with dithermask). Then, paste it onto the second picture, with the obscure yellowish color as the secondary, transparent color. Now, you've got two ditherblended pictures.
But, if you want it to look REALLY good, scale it by %50, and it ends up looking like a real blended picture.
GRADIENTS - FOR REALS
This is much simpler.
Make a 50x50 image like this, with two colors of your choice:
Now, resize it horizontally to %1.
Then, stretch that tiny line horizontally to as wide as you'd like.
Yay.
OH WAIT ONE MORE!
COLOR-REPLACEMENT
Make a simple picture like this:
Now, get the color picker. Make your primary color the one you want to replace, and the secondary color to be the one you want to put in it's place.
Now fetch your eraser tool, and right click away.
By combining these methods, you can do some cool stuff.
What the hell IS this?
Look, I'm all for new ideas and creative content, but this article is nothing more than a step-by-step "how to waste your time and make absolutely pointless and crappy artwork" article.
If you're going to teach these kids something, make sure it's something they'd want to learn first please.
What the hell IS this?
Look, I'm all for new ideas and creative content, but this article is nothing more than a step-by-step "how to waste your time and make absolutely pointless and crappy artwork" article.
If you're going to teach these kids something, make sure it's something they'd want to learn first please.
You didn't read this, did you? This is just some cool techniques usable in paint that I know you didnt't know.
Whoa! I knew MSPaint had some hidden awesomeness (like the selective recoloring), but I thought I had found it all. Apparantly that wasn't the case. I will use this guide of awesome.
cough Graphics Gale! what? seriously though. its got onion skin, animation frames, auto 'every-other' dithering, right click eye dropper, multiple layers, and its free. much better than MS paint.
Dang, that's awesome!! Didn't know you got go past 8x and I used to always use Microsoft Word for quick gradients. This is some really good info!! Haha!
Oops, I lied. Gradient works. Bibin, you may want to make it a bit clearer - say to go to Stretch/Skew. But then again, you had the "%" in there, so I may have not been reading very carefully.
Anyway, I found a pretty strange glitch. Can anyone figure it out? Try this: Make your canvas 50x50, then draw your two triangles, as shown in Bibin's article. Go to Stretch/Skew, resize to 1%, and then look at the result. Gradient right? Now, UNDO that. You should be back to normal again. Now, flip it horizontally, then flip it horizontally again. Should be the same right? NOW try to generate the gradient. DOESN'T WORK, WTF?