WALKTHROUGH: ART THROUGH THE MEDIUM OF MSPAINT!

I tried something new today. One question I get a lot is "what program did you use for that?" When I say Photoshop, the response is, "ooh, I wish I had that, my graphics programs suck and I can't do anything good..."

Therefore I decided I was going to produce an entire finished drawing in nothing but good old MS Paint. I actually use Paint a lot for sketching layouts so I'm probably more familiar with it than many people. Even so I never considered using it for art.

The first thing I decided was that if I was going to do this I had to be serious about it. I wasn't allowed to use Photoshop for anything except saving it for the Web. Everything else had to be done in Paint.

I've done a lot of Sonic recently, so I decided to try something different. I've always wanted to do Neopets fanart. And what Neopet better than my beloved Korbat, Gwyn?

1: SKETCHING

I'd never drawn Gwyn before, or any batlike creature. Neopets.com actually has tutorials on how to draw the pets, but I didn't go anywhere near them. "How To Draw" tutorials are only good for teaching you to reproduce a particular picture, and I didn't want my drawing to just be a copy of a Neopets image. Therefore the first thing I did was open up Google's image search and look for pictures of bats.

Using the Pencil tool I sketched in Gwyn's anatomy using these bat pictures. His head was based on a flying fox, while his body was based on a variety of bats. I worked in blue for reasons which I will explain later. Bats, it turns out, have some pretty weird anatomy. I had a completely wrong idea in my head about how the wings went, so it was a good thing I looked them up!

The first thing I drew was the skull, followed by the ribcage and the bones of the limbs. When I was happy with the skeleton I had, I switched my colour to black and started drawing Gwyn's actual outlines. Even though I have a Wacom tablet I was doing a lot of the close work with the mouse, because it's easier to be accurate with a mouse.

Time: 15 mins

2: LINE ART

Still using the Pencil tool, I neatened and thickened my black lines until I had a nice line art drawing of Gwyn. This took a while. Basically I went in with the Zoom tool and did it all in close-up with the Pencil, scratching in the lines and cleaning them up.

Then, I selected the Eraser. I made my foreground colour blue, and my background colour white. I went over Gwyn with the eraser, using the right mouse button. This is a great feature of Paint; it's called the Color Eraser. Basically it replaces the foreground colour with the background colour. The eraser replaced all the blue with white but left the black lines. So I ended up with pure black line art!

Time: 35 mins

3: BASIC COLOURING

I still wasn't sure exactly what I was going to do at this point. However, Gwyn needed colour sooner or later. I had been very careful to make perfect line art, so all I had to do was select my colours, get the Paint Can tool and go click click click.

Time: 40 mins

4: DRAWING BACKGROUNDS

At this stage I still had no idea what I was going to do for a background! I was determined to include one, though, because I hate seeing art on a lazy white nothingness. When I look at other people's art, I appreciate even a crappy background because at least the artist tried.

It seemed pretty obvious that Gwyn should be sitting on castle battlements. I mean, where else do bats hang out? Aside from belfries, which now I think about it would have been an even cooler idea. At any rate, I pulled up my good friend Google once more and typed "battlement" into the search engine. Armed with a few nice pictures I took up the pencil again and sketched in a messy sort of background.

Time: 1 hour

5: INKING THE BACKGROUND

Same drill as inking Gwyn himself. I took the opportunity to fix some stuff and generally neaten things up. I was painstakingly neat, which meant it took a while, but I was also listening to Queen which tended to distract me. When I was satisfied, it was eraser time once more.

Time: 1 hour 50 mins

6: COLOURING THE BACKGROUND

Again, I'd been very careful with my outlining, so all I had to do was get the paint can and fill the various areas. However, I did have to start thinking now about shading. I decided that my light source would be behind Gwyn; since bats like the dark, it would have to be sunset. Therefore, parts of the wall would be shadowed and parts would be brightly lit up.

Time: 1 hour 55 mins

7: SHADING

This is the thing that always takes longest for me. However, shading in MS Paint was going to be a different experience to shading in Photoshop. I quickly realised that there was no way I could get the usual variations. My only option was to use the anime "cel-style" shading with hard edges. Which is okay.

Firstly, I used the Color Eraser to block in the shading. For the sky I replaced orange with a slightly lighter orange, then replaced parts of that with a pale yellow, and that with a paler yellow. Areas away from the sun were made a darker reddish orange. (Remember in Paint you can make your own colours by double-clicking on a colour in the palette and pressing the "Define Custom Colors" button; you don't have to use the sixteen in the palette).

I got all enthusiastic and added many levels of shading, until I decided I would have to stop just to save my sanity. When the basic colours were all in place, I switched to the Pencil tool again and zoomed in for some fine tweaking. Where highlights or shadows needed to be brought to a fine point, I drew in the point with the Pencil. I also cleaned things up a lot.

This stage took a long time, but it was mostly just the same repetitive stuff, moving on from one area to another. I always love putting extra effort into shading because it totally transforms a picture. Look at the lackluster pic above, then compare it to my final product, which is fully shaded. It makes it all worthwhile.

Time: 2 hours 50 mins

8: EFFECTS

There's really not very much you can do in Paint by way of special effects. Well, to be honest, practically nothing. However, you can add text, if you go to Image and deselect Draw Opaque first. Just some simple stuff - Gwyn's name and mine in Skeksis, and the Neopets copyright in Verdana. (Neopets, Inc. are very strict about copyright and I don't want to get them mad).

So there we have it. A fully coloured, fully shaded drawing, done entirely in MS Paint. Not bad is it? See, now you have no excuse!

Time: 3 hours

You can click here to see a larger version.

MY THOUGHTS

This was certainly an experience, and pretty fun too! However, I don't think it would have been so easy if I hadn't had the Wacom pen. I actually only used the Wacom for the blue sketches, but having it made the job faster.

As for the result... well, I don't think I need to be ashamed of it. I even like this better than a lot of Photoshop pics I've done... it's got better line art than I ever achieved with a pen, and the colours don't clash like some of my stuff. Most of all, Paint forced me to do things right rather than, for instance, fixing bad colours with a Hue adjustment. Verdict: Worth a try.

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Email: quillandlauren@yahoo.com
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