Mojotronica's Guide

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Mojotronica wrote this short guide to DYOSing back in July 2003 for DYOS 1, dealing with using Paint and making Cut-and-Paste comics.


Advice for aspiring DRAW Thread Cartoonists. [Windows Version]

Want to contribute to the DRAW thread but don't know where to begin?

Here's a link to web-page that gives you an overview of how MS Paint (the SW bundled w/ all versions of Windows) works. Also includes a link to a page that will instruct you on how to perform a screen capture.

http://graphicssoft.about.com/gi/dyn...2Fpaint-00.htm

Here's another tutorial -- more technical advice on it: http://www.geocities.com/mistweir/mspaint_tut.html

You can gather images for use in MS Paint by using Google's Image search feature. Simply enter a description of the image you are looking for in the Search field, and click on the Image tab. You should be able to find something close to what you want that way.

I always open several Explorer pages and at least two MS Paints -- one for the finished cartoon and the other to put together the elements to paste onto it.

Be sure to save your finished page as a JPEG file.


Three EZ steps to nice-looking cartoons:

  • a) Use the Floodfill tool to color the background before pasting anything onto the page. That's (I think) how Curt gets his crisp black backgrounds.
  • b) Copy and paste CFC Avatars onto the black background, leaving space for witty commentary and dialogue. Be sure that the chronology of the lay-out is easy to follow.
  • c) Use the Text Box to fill in the dialogue. Be sure that the background to the text is white and the foreground black or another dark color.



Editors' Commentary

Some other helpful tips.

Artistic Media

Saving Images

PNG images are sharper, so it might be a good idea to save two copies of the comic, one as PNG and then another as JPEG.

Hosting Images

Imageshack and Photobucket are two good free image hosting sites. Note that file size restrictions apply to free accounts. To reduce file size, upload your image as a JPEG. You can also divide your comic up into sections.

Speech Balloons

See the Speech balloon article.

Scanning Hand-Drawn Comics