Make Your Own Decals

[ruzlkampf]

Now let's call out the heavy artillery and throw that pencil away. Don't worry,...it's there anytime you want on that tool menu. Remember, what I'm trying to do here is show what all these buttons do, where they are, and how to manipulate them to your advantage. WHAT you do with them is entirely up to you, and is called 'art'.

Let's go from a pencil to a brush so we can cover huge swaths easily and fill this in. Go (obviously) to that 'brush' button. This gives us almost everything from pin-stripe brush to something to paint a house with. Uuuuuhhh, remember the 'undo' button again? I've learned to paint in little swipes to keep from having to constantly touch things up, but go on......have some fun!

 

 

 

[N312RB]

Mr. Camp!

 

You are probably the best teacher... this year, no, make that of all time!

 

This is the most entertaining how-to thread ever. I am actually halfway crying I have been laughing so hard.

 

I did not realize Paint was this hard, this makes Photoshop and Illustrator look easy haha

 

I cannot wait until the next class... I wanna sit up front!

 

You have such a non rivet counting passion for this hobby! I love it!

[ruzlkampf]

After filling everything in, it's time to clean up around my letter and see what it looks like. There's an eraser on the tool bar, but it won't get into the little crooks and crannies of my 'M'. I'm going to paint those areas white like my background with my pencil,....but what if you're background is some color that isn't on that color palette below? The 'color selection' tool is one of the handiest things on this tool bar, and it's usefulness will become obvious the first time you use it. Basically when you choose this your mouse curser becomes an 'eyedropper', that when you put it on any pixel and left click will display the color of whatever INDIVIDUAL pixel it is pointed at on the palette below. I'm keeping things basic here, and just took a sample of my background color(white) to choose a color for my pencil to get up into the tight places of my letter to get rid of all those lines I laboriously slathered all over my image.

 

 

 

[ruzlkampf]

Heeeey Remington! Glad you're enjoying this long slow dirge into infinity! Paint program isn't difficult, there's only about what,....8-10 buttons? The difficulty is describing how to get these tools to get what you want them to do without banging your head on the desk! Once I get past all these basics(this is the LAST Paint tutorial by gosh!) things will get a LOT more interesting. I'm sure a lot of others with different editing software will be chiming in and the knowledge base will grow explosively. They don't want to play with us yet, cuz we're still riding around on tricycles, and haven't even moved up to a bike with training wheels yet!

OK, I went ahead and picked those little buggers out of the tops of the legs on my 'M' and can use the 'eraser' tool to clean huge swaths of area around my image. Here's where you find it, and it's use is pretty obvious. Any problems or questions with this, well, you'll just have to talk to my 'European Consultant' when he gets back from the bathroom,...looo,...head,....powder room? Ohhhh whatever. He's been taking notes.

 

 

 

[ruzlkampf]

Here's what that eraser menu looks like. Choose the size of your photon-torpedo to send the pixels into another quadrant of the galaxy. It's fun! Whups!, Forgot I was talking to dummys,.....it will only erase while holding down the left mouse button. Remember the 'undo' button!

 

 

 

 

 

[ruzlkampf]

Here's what you get after wiping all those unwanted and unloved pixels off the page. All this may sound complicated, but it's really only a few clicks of your mouse and a moment of your time in the real-world. As I said in the beginning,.... it's a lot easier to do than explain. Let's move on.

 

 

 

[ruzlkampf]

Now, we've gone thru almost all of the buttons that youll probably ever use and the Paint part of this lesson is almost over. There is no substitute for experience, so just doodle and erase, flip and rotate, everything until you get the hang of it. This part of the lesson has been about CREATING from scratch images in paint for those with no scanner. It'll start getting fun when we start importing images and editing them to our tastes and stuff. I'm going to move on to the 'A' now and do my chicken-pecking pixel count to again get everything centered and the same width as my 'M'. I started with these letters and fonts for creating something from scratch intentionally as they are block letters and 'easily' duplicated. So we're going to pick up our skirts(uuuhhmmm, well except for Derek who prefers evening gowns. Just kidding with ya again my dear friend!) and start moving along at a faster pace now that we have an idea of what these buttons are capable of doing. Again, you may find that you have an easier way of doing this that works for you. Go for it dudes!

Getting my widths and general outline started by counting pixels;

 

 

 

 

[ruzlkampf]

Using 'line' and choosing a color I start connecting the dots.

 

 

 

[ruzlkampf]

Doing the same thing I did with the 'M' using the pencil and brush to fill things in;

 

 

 

[ruzlkampf]

And using the eraser tool and pencil to get rid of all those barnacle-like pixels that keep hanging around,......

 

 

 

 

[ruzlkampf]

I got this,.....2 letters that are the wrong color for what I need, but are correctly sized and look like pixellated lumps of crap! Bwhahahahaha! Aaaaaah, but my mentally challenged friends,....the entire digital WORLD is nothing but a bunch of pixels that look like jagged shards of glass. Just like any kind of art,...it's all about the illusion. The human eye can be fooled and tricked so easily it can seem like sleight-of-hand and magic, but it's just a bunch of dots on a page! The key to the magic world of illusion is something called 'resolution' in an image. More on this in a minute when I do my kill markings.

 

 

 

 

[ruzlkampf]

OK, now I'm going to pull a rabbit outta my hat.....(oh wait a minute, it's gone. Dadgummit I wondered where that darn Derek got that coney for his lunch) and go to the magnifying glass button and bring this to the canvas size we made originally. Looks a lot different from what I typed out originally, eh?!

 

 

 

 

[ruzlkampf]

Well, I want black codes and did them in green for ya'll for some contrast while I was doodling around with them. Let me zoom back in using the magnifying glass, and choosing my color for 'line', or 'brush, or 'pencil'.......I'm going to start changing these back to black. I wanted to do it this way, cuz a know a few might like to see putting a contrasting color border on an image.

 

 

 

[ruzlkampf]

All back to black now, and everything is sized correctly. Being a lazy sack of potatoes, I don't want to redraw this again so we're going to do the 'select', right-click,'copy', 'paste' trick again. Remember how to do that? I zoomed back out to do this cuz it's easier.

 

 

 

[ruzlkampf]

Here, I'll do it again for those that took a snooze 2 pages ago. Last time though, we've got to move onto doing some printing!