How to draw sub cutaways in MS Paint (2015)
hisutton.com
hisutton.com
Wow, what a workaround for not having layers!
At junior high, this guy sitting close to me would spend all lessons where a computer was available to draw Scania trucks in paint. Somewhat similar in style to this random one I found by a search now, but sometimes even at an angle with perspective https://www.flickr.com/photos/145204045@N05/31629814288
Is this supposed to be written like this? I thought it would be canon in this instance?
I'm going to blame the fact that I've been playing a Civil War game a lot recently, and batteries of artillery are on my mind.
There are lots of things I do that others would consider dumb. I code my own versions of so many tools and projects that already exist, just because I like to do it. Any sane programmer would look at my work and roll their eyes.
(PSP itself is still around, but it has turned to sh*t unfortunately.)
"People on HN complain about using of Paint, a terrible software for the Job"
What that people use?
- Vim - Emacs - C - Pico - Shell (and here stuff like grep...) - ... (fill here your grudges, I not judge you)
"And people wonder: Imagine if that guy use something, like, you know... modern AND good?"
With vim, emacs, C, shell etc... you can still do everything other programs do, there is just more setup and sharp edges.
With MS Paint, no amount of setup can produce gradients or layers with proper transparency. It is not usability/polish question, this is core deficiency.
A bit like a lot of coding in Vim.
Off topic, but this is a really good point.
I'm very happy that much of the software I used when I was on Windows was either open source or cross platform, and currently make a point to use cross platform software as much as possible. I'm happy with Linux now, but want to still be able to change!
Not that it isn't impressive, but the title is misleading when you look at the picture and wonder how are these gradients done with paint? That's impressive indeed (which was my first thought).
> how I draw the illustrations old-school in MS Paint and shade in GIMP
Impressive, yes. But also time-consuming. I find gradients very hard myself: both hard to match when editing an existing photo and also hard to make look good when drawing something new, but (without knowing how) I would venture that one can save a ton of time by not doing this all manually as shown in that video.
I might even argue this is not "done with Paint" so much as "done by hand / by choosing each pixel manually" (because even with bucket fill, you still choose where the line of each shade of the gradient is, plus choosing the color) which is of course entirely independent of the tool -- could be gimp, could be photoshop, could be mspaint.
Which is not to say that paint can't do cool stuff faster than just doing every pixel manually. Nerdparadise has nice tutorials on that: https://nerdparadise.com/mspaint Now that I check this page again, it actually has gradients, and it actually uses a different technique :) https://nerdparadise.com/mspaint/lineargradient Too bad it only works in a single direction, though. I see many of the submarines have more of a radial pattern which is another tutorial on NP but more manual work and less good result.
One wonderful result of Adobe moving to Creative Cloud subscriptions, and generally making it less easy to pirate, is the growth in genuine alternatives to Photoshop and Illustrator!
Interested people can download and use it for non-commercial purposes, then want to use it in the industry. Bonus if there are indie licensing levels that are heavily discounted.
Intentionally or not.
Nowadays it's just not worth trying to install CC without a license IMHO.
Do I trust the tools that will hack a CC license?
No sir, I do not!
My kids "Photoshop" things but they don't use Photoshop. They recommend free or cheaper tools to each other and that's what they use.
I recently started experimenting with a similar technique in inkscape. It seems like a much better tool than paint+gimp for drawing, layering, and shading polygons. That said, the tool is only an enabler for actual artistic skill, the ability to translate an image from your head to a medium. To me that's the hard part.
My experience is that, while I can certainly do lovely work with any way of making a mark and enough time, shitty tools will take a lot of time to get decent work, decent tools will take a sensible amount of time relative to how much people are willing to pay me, and power tools - once you've learnt how to use them properly - will let me work a lot faster for the same quality of work.
Pushing single pixels in Paint is like writing assembly language for artists, except we don't even get the benefit of all that time spent coming back as blazingly fast execution. We just had to spend a lot more time than other tools could have let us take.
It's a bit like debating whether an axe is better then a chainsaw... I used both and I can tell you that an axe requires a lot more efforts....
I mean, you could provide me with any graphic tool in the world, even the most advanced ones, and I wouldn't be able to produce anything half as beautiful as those cutaways.
Really wish I had taken more time to get comfortable in Inkscape.
I recommend starting with tracing a simple logo (place reference image on a locked layer), then try and trace a country's coastline. Should only take an afternoon. From there you're off to the races!
Excel artists beg to differ: https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/12/tatsuo-horiuchi-excel...
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I've never heard of this person or seen their illustrations, but after reading the article and viewing the finished artwork it's hard to argue with - clearly, he enjoys the process and has no desire to change it, and the end result looks great.