As long as you've got a decent sense of creativity and envisioning specifically what you want to draw, there's no real rocket science behind this stuff at all.

But because sometimes people like to hear it straight from the horse's mouth, I'll show you how I do it.

Step 1.

The first and most important step is to get a very good idea beforehand of exactly how you're going to draw your subject (in my case, usually human characters).

The best way you can accomplish this is by doing a crude doodle by hand on scrap paper with pencil beforehand. This is usually how I do it, because it allows you to erase with impunity and get a good idea of any hurdles that may come up when translating your vision to MS Paint form.

If, for some reason, you can't do this, then the next best thing you can do is scratch out a very crude, general idea of what you're going to draw in MS Paint itself. If you want to do this, I reccommend you use the Paintbrush tool on standard setting, pick a very bright, garish color that you most likely won't be using in your drawing (say, bold pink or bright red/blue...avoid yellow because you'll hurt your eyes trying to see it against the standard white), and scratch out a very quick silhouette or skeleton (Fig. 1).

I say to use the Paintbrush rather than the Pencil tool at this stage because if you screw up the positioning of an arm or the crag of a mountain or something really badly, it's very easy to Flood Fill the lines with the canvas color, paint over any leftover mess, and start from scratch.

Fig. 1

tx, I never thought about that.

It really works! Thanks Professor Reed!

i refuse to participate in any mspaint ventures until i get one of those e-pen and pad things.

ben, you got my b.reed vs cammy pic?

next step?

Step 2.

Having gotten our crude concept illustrated here, the next order of business is refining our crude concept into an intelligible shape.

In this case, since our subject is human, I'm going to pick a different color (in this case, the default red, because it stands out well against blue and white) and draw the fingers, refine the muscle contours, make the head look somewhat human, and the like. There's no real trick to this, either -- just take your time (speed kills when you're working with the Paintbrush or Pencil) and make sure your lines are the right shape.

For this step, I reccommend sticking with the Paintbrush rather than switching to the Pencil, because while the Pencil draws a finer line by default, you have to really thicken your lines to make them easy to Flood Fill (very important later) and in doing so, you can often make them really kinky and messy with lots of little stray pixels. If you want narrower lines with the Paintbrush, what I reccommend is keeping your secondary color set to white (or whatever canvas color you're using) and using the right mouse button to "carve" your lines into narrower shapes.

If you went ahead with the alternate method in Step 1 of drawing your concept directly in MS Paint, you can simply draw over your cruder outline with a different bright color like so (Fig. 2). If you're drawing based on a pencil sketch, your result will most likely look very similar.

Fig. 2

I wish I had some 3D glasses.

bloops. now ben is out of my league with his actual METHODS and SKILLS.

i just draw until it looks right.

damn thats too bad ass, I give up

In my figure drawing class that's how we were taught as well. Rough (like 5sec rough) sketch, refine, refine, refine.

Step 3.

All right, so now we've got a good idea of where our crude shape is going. The next order of business is to clean out the nasty parts that we don't want to keep so that coloring is a cinch.

If you've done like in Step 2 and drawn a cleaner outline with a different color on top of the crude one, then getting rid of most of the unwanted lines is as simple as selecting the Flood Fill tool and right-clicking away, filling those lines with white (or the canvas color) and washing them away quickly and painlessly.

Now, invariably, you're going to have little bits of blue or pink or whatever that you want to wash away that are too isolated and too small to get with the initial Flood Filling. What you want to do with them is up to you and your level of commitment -- you can just kinda ignore them if they're really tiny and insignificant, or you can paint over/erase them so they don't detract from the finished version, although it's okay if you wait for the coloring stage to do that.

Once you've gotten rid of all the unwanted lines by flood filling, be sure to patch any unwanted gaps in your outline, as it's almost time for you to start filling in the basic color of your subject. At the end of this step, your drawing should look like Fig. 3.

Fig. 3

happy trees

So good so far:

How do I make it save at a larger size?

So is this going to end in Julia vs. Ben Reed V?





It better.

all i have to say is wowzaa... of to work... hopefully this will be a million pages by then... and i can learn myself!

hmmm, see, I'd have thought you'd have at least finished the tutorial before posting the thread....

Step 4.

Okay, in this step, if you have any last additions or changes to make to your outline before you start coloring, MAKE THEM NOW, because if you forget about something and remember it during the coloring stage, it gets really awkward to put them in/take them out.

In this case, since I forgot about the guy's other glove, and I want to make his left hand look a little better, I'll do that first. The main thing I want to do before I start coloring him, though, is to give him the outline of his hair, clothing, and face. (I usually wait to do the face because I like to make sure the rest of the body is up to snuff first and figure out which way to point the head.)

If you're gonna put loose clothes on somebody, it's best to draw the naked body first and then figure out how to fit the clothes on them, because that way you can make sure your proportions are pretty well done and figure out the way folds and wrinkles and crap are gonna go. If you're adding really involved clothing, like fancy fests or really loose robes, it's best to use a different color for the clothing outline so that you can keep the anatomy visible while you sort out how it should fit.

Once you've drawn the outline of the clothing the way you want, just do like in Step 3 and flood-fill out the things that shouldn't be there with the canvas color. Once your drawing looks something like Fig. 4, you're ready to color.

Fig. 4



Our hero, Terry Bogard of Fatal Fury fame.

Originally Posted by GKFC

hmmm, see, I'd have thought you'd have at least finished the tutorial before posting the thread....

The post would have been a mile long and everyone would have whined about "I'm not reading all that"...it's a lot easier on me and everyone else to break it up like so.

heres something i just did for fun... took about 15-20 min.