Tools and Basic Information



Stuff
(more specifically, the stuff that’s in the pic above starting from beneath where it says “Normal”)

The palette – Your colors, silly. :p Right-clicking a space will put your active color in that space. If you hold the Shift button and click, it will restore that space to the color it was at default.

R/G/B Bars – These bars let you change the color of the active palette square. If you’ve never colored on the computer, it might seem awfully confusing, so….

A-Bar – This is really-really-really important. It changes the density and opacity of various tools.

Quick Palette – These three little spots memorize the tool/color/etc settings you have whenever you right-click. It makes it easier to go back to your commonly used settings.

Layers (bottom-right corner) – Click this to change which layer you draw on. Right click to make the active layer invisible.

Tools (these buttons can be clicked multiple times can be clicked again to cycle through different tools.)


Solid – Unless you lower the A-bar, this only puts a single color down on the canvas. It’s more pixilated and crisp than watercolor.
 

Watercolor – This is used to make things antialiased and softer than solid. Adjust the A-bar to make it more or less opaque.


Text – It lets you type. ^_^ The px setting determines the size of the text, but it starts to looks too scrunched and unreadable once you get below 4px. You can make text transparent by lowering the A-bar


Tone (Halftone) – This tool puts down a pattern of single pixels. More pixels together makes it look darker. Change the A-bar to change the amount of pixels.


Shade Off (Blur) – This is the blur tool. It can help blend your colors together… but use this tool with caution! I’ve seen it muck some nice pics.


Dark – This is like a burn tool, I think. It makes the colors darker, but I don’t really like using it.


HLight (Light) – This is the opposite of Dark.


Rect – This lets you drag a filled colored rectangle. If you lower the A-bar, the rectangle will be transparent.


LineRect – Same as rect, but the rectangle is only outlined. The outline’s thickness depends on the px setting. Lowering the A-bar makes it transparent.


Oval – This lets you drag a filled colored oval. If you lower the A-bar, it will be transparent.


LineOval – Same as oval, but the rectangle is only outlined. The outline’s thickness depends on the px setting. Lowering the A-bar makes it transparent. (Not antialiased. Pooey.)


Copy – This is a life saver! Draw a square around what you want copied and then drag to the new location. If necessary, erase the old one. If you can get used to this tool, you can sometimes use it for cheap resizing. Here’s a funky tip too: After you draw the rectangle, but before you drag it, you can switch layers. Then when you drag, you’ll copy it to the other layer. Heheh.


Layer Unif – This unifies the two layers onto whichever the active layer is. Have you ever found yourself thinking something synonymous to, “Noooh! I drew the characters on the bottom layer! Now I can’t do a good BG!!! *cries*”? Just switch to the top layer and use Layer Unif on the whole image, and it’s fixed. ^_^


Antialias – This makes stuff look kinda fuzzy. Sometimes. Sometimes it does weird stuff. If you can get it to work right, be careful. It has the same downsides as Shade Off.


ReverseLR (flipHorizontal)  – This flips the image horizontally. Combine it with the Copy, and this is very helpful if you can’t do symmetry well.


ReverseUL (flipVertical) – Just like RL, but it flips it vertically instead. ^_^


Lie (rotate) – This turns the contents of the rectangle by ninety degrees to the right. (The lower-left corner ends up where the upper-left corner was.)


White – This is a very important tool! It’s a priceless eraser. It allows the layer to be transparent. If you erase with the color white, you won’t be able to see through the layer below. Move the A-bar to 255 to make it solid; it will be antialiased otherwise.


WhiteRect – This lets you erase a rectangular area. If you lower the A-bar, whatever you try to erase will become transparent. ^_^ It’s really spiffy.


Clear – If you decide your fed up with the pic and want to start over, select this tool and click somewhere. Both layers will be cleared. Don’t forget you can push undo if you do it by accident.


Paint (Fill) – Sometimes people forget this tool, because it’s not grouped with the others. It lets you fill in an enclosed area, like the paint bucket in MS Paint. If you lower the A-bar, its fills it in with transparency.

Cursor Settings (Click FreeLine until it says the other two things….)


Freeline – Draw around in whatever way you want.


Straight – Drag a straight line. If you have problems with the freehand looking wiggly, try using the straight instead in very, very, very short segments. If you hook a bunch of really short straight lines together, the line will still look curved.


Bezier – This is hard to explain. First draw a straight line then select the curves. Maybe this pic will help. At the end of the line, it lines up with the “handle” for a bit.

These settings apply to the following: solid, watercolor, tone, dark, hlight, shade off, and white.


Masks (click normal to change. Right clicking changes the masked color)


Normal – This is with no mask of any sort.


Mask – This makes it so you can’t color over the masked color. It help make sure you don’t color over your lines.


ReMask – Reverse Mask. This makes it so you can color over only the masked color. Very useful, but it doesn’t work well with watercolor.


And – You can only color over colors that are darker than the one you’re using.


Div - You can only color over colors that are lighter than the one you’re using.


Misc.


Undo – Make a mistake? Push this! Push it again to undo another, but it only goes back a few.


Redo – Decided that Undo-ing wasn’t a good idea. Click this!


F (Full) – This’ll open up a new window that makes it easier to see everything at once.


Link – Answer yes when prompted by the Engrishy dialogue box, and a new browser window will open taking you to 
http://www.gt.sakura.ne.jp/~ocosama/
, the web page of Shi-cyan (the person that made the Paint BBS).


“+” and –“ -On either side of the bottom of the image, there are these buttons. Use them to zoom in and out.


Send – This will send your pic to the board.

 Microsoft Paint (c) Microsoft Inc.
PaintBBS/Shi-Oekaki (c) Shi-cyan
Tutorial content, example pictures, art and characters (c) Cyllya unless stated otherwise
Website name is a shameless rip-off of a Japanese restaurant(?) called "Oh! Nigiri!"