User:A Beautiful Oblivion/Charart Tutorial

Introduction
I've heard many users who use Pixlr, and if you were looking for a tutorial on that, you should leave now, for I have never, nor probably ever will, use Pixlr. I just got used to using GIMP (which is what I'll be teaching) before I joined PCA, so it's what I use. I'm going to assume you know how to use GIMP for this, no explaining what things do or where they are. If you'd like to learn, look at Insane's GIMP tutorial for help. She explains the tools and how to use layers really well :)

I also use Miscrosoft Paint, which is a free program that comes with every Windows computer. You don't need to use Paint, but it's what I do. You can do the same things (and more) on GIMP that you can do in Paint, so feel free to just skip where I use Paint and use GIMP instead. I will indicate every step in which I use Paint, just so you'll know.

Getting Started
Anyway, getting started. Go to PCA and select the blank you'll be using. I tend to do things the hard way and stick to them, so I use the snipping tool (which comes with Vista and Windows 7) and select the blank, then copy and paste it into Paint. Then, select the crop button in Paint (or press CTRL + Shift + x) and it will resize the image to the blank.

Brown Cats
Step 1: Find your blank (which I explained)

Step 2: Add eye colour and use the bucket tool (Paint) to fill in the cat with colour. No earpink just yet, that's on GIMP. Now, for the eye, I like to put a darker colour in the middle and two lighter pixels of the same colour on either side of it. You may do it any way you want, but that's just me :)

''Okay, now here is where (for solid colours) you insert the image into GIMP. On Paint, go to Select, then Select All. Copy the image (or press CTRL + c).On GIMP, go to File, then underneath New, it should say Create, with a little arrow beside it. Hover over that, and then click on From Clipboard. Your image should show up, in its own layers. Be sure to right click on the layer and select Add Alpha Channel, or it won't be transparent.''

On the subject of transparency, it's also explained in Insane's tutorial (link's at the top), so I won't tell you xD

Step 3: Okay, so create a new layer and do this <- using the Brush, circle fuzzy 15. Be sure to use black or it won't work (der :P) You can see there's some colour outside of the lineart and the shading looks really bad, that's fine, it'll be fixed when it's blurred.

Step 4: Using the Smudge tool (circle fuzzy 15), blur the shading as much as you can.

Step 5: Reduce the layer's opacity until the shading looks good. For this, it's at 21.6%, and looks good to me.

Step 6: Add earpink (remember to add a new layer!)

And there you have it: a brown warrior.