A beginner's guide to paint.

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This tutorial was created by Nathris, for the tibia.de graphics forum. You can find the original here: link


Paint. Everyone has it, everyone hates it(well mostly, there are a few who like to use it). Hopefully after reading this you will be armed and ready to make graphics that don't receive immediate, stop using paint! comments.

I'm not going to teach you how to make a particular item, I am going to give you the skills to make any item you wish. Starting with the basics.

1.) Attributes

The first thing anyone will notice about any graphic is the size. Standard Dristin graphics sizes are 32 x 32 pixels and 64 x 64 pixels, also exceptions can be made as long as the size is a multiple of 32 (e.g., 96, 128).

The best way to change the size of your canvas is by going Image > Attributes... (Shortcut Ctrl-E). From there you simple put in the width and height dimensions and click OK.

2.) Magnification

Most graphics artists don't squint at the screen, they zoom in using the magnification tool. In Paint there are 4 levels of magnification, 1x, 2x, 4x, and 8x. However if you have the patience you can achieve 10x by clicking just underneath 8x on the toolbar. I recommend using 8 or 10 times magnification for graphics.


3.) Drawing

While this seems obvious all I still wish to point out that you should be using the paint brush, with the 1x1px(smallest) brush selected. Simply left click to draw the foreground color and right click to draw the background color.

4.) Color Palette

Again this seems obvious, I am merely pointing out a few things that users may not know. To change the foreground color left click on one of the colored boxes, to change the background color right click on one of the colored boxes, there is one more color you can have and you can use it by pressing control while drawing.

5.) Edit colors.

Thankfully Paint isn't limited to 28 colors. To open the color dialog double click one of the color boxes. See below pic for more explanation of the color dialog.

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6. Paint bucket.

The paint bucket merely saves you the trouble by filling in a pixel and all pixels of the SAME color that are attached to it from the left, right, up, or down.


Tips and Tricks


Color box.

While you aren't limited to 28 colors, you still can't have more than 28 colors active. To combat this I use a color box. To put it plainly, I have just created another color palette, only its part of the image. Using the eyedropper tool I can select a color from it to apply to my image.


This concludes my tutorial on Paint, there are still more things to discover about paint, but with things I have shown you today it makes it a bit easier to create masterpieces, 1 example is Lord Ariakas, who made his way onto the Tibia graphics team with paint alone. (Use the WoT forum search if you are curious about his works.)

Thanks to Made of Clay for the ctrl-click color.

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