* Note * This tutorial is not a "How to Draw" tutorial. I will assume you already know that much. Rather, this tutorial explains how you can use MS Paint to "mask" or paint under your line art, and is targeted towards people who already have an understanding of Oekaki Applets. (ex. OekakiBBS, PaintBBS, ShiPainter, etc.)

I am not the best at explaining things, but I hope this will let people experiment more with this wonderful program. Too many artists and other poeple neglect its capabilities.

1 - Start off by drawing the lineart of your image.

2 - The tool used for the face was the Brush tool.

3 - If you make a mistake zoom in and select the white brush for a touch up job.

4 - I used the Zoom tool to get a larger view of the image, and used the Curve tool to do the hair strands.

5 - Once the lineart is all complete, I selected the Rectangle Tool and added a border around the image.

6 - Here is where it might get a bit tricky. Right, double click a color selection in the color pallette other than black, white, or grey. (These colors are usually useful to have, so I don't change them.) When the edit color screen comes up, select the "Define Custom Colors" button and a color selection grid will show up. Select an appropriate color for a skin tone (or whatever you are coloring first.)

7 - Make sure the color you selected is indeed on the background, select white to be the foreground.
* Brief Explination * The color on the top will be the color you want to "replace" and the color on the bottom is the color that will replace it.

8 - Select the Eraser tool, and taking the largest brush, go ahead and fill in the entire background. In order to do this without covering up your line art, with the Eraser tool selected, RIGHT click, holding down and paint with it just like the brush tool. This should allow the color to effect only the foreground color, (white).

9 - Repeat the steps selecting darker skin tones for more demensional shading, but instead of leaving "white" as the foreground, you have to select the new background color. Remember, the color you always want to to be painting with stays on the bottom. This might take some experimentation and practice before you can grasp the concept. Use the Dropper tool to help you select colors you've already used.

10 - The postive space of my image is complete. So I select my original skin tone color from the beginning with the dropper tool and add in a different color to the background.

11 - Once thats done I selected 2 more colors and just scribbled in stuff for the negative space. Save as a 24 bit BMP file, or else MS Paint will HORRIBLY compress your image. If you would like to compress to some other sort of file extension like a JPG or PNG, then do it through a image editing program like Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop.

Hopefully this opens a door to those who have always shyed away from MS Paint. Experiment around with it, try new things, and don't limit yourself to just this tutorial.

Please leave comments and post any MS Paint experimentations that you have done from using this tutorial. Thanks!