Make your own avatar.. using only MS Paint!
By
Deceivius,
Posted on: 2006-04-26 07:26 in Player Guides
how do i get MS paint?
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how do i get MS paint?
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You, sir, win at life.
Always up for teaming with good players, so hit me up: @Deceivius and @Deceivius2
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how do i get MS paint?
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Noob_Ninja, are you runing on windows? If so you should have it. Open up your image and if it comes up in Windows picture and fax, at the bottom there are some icons the one that is a landscape is what you want. When you click on that it will reopen the image in paint for editing. If you do not see either of these programs on your computer then check the following:
Start- Control Panel- Add/remove programs- Add/remove windows components- make sure that accessories and utilities is checked and install.
If none of this worked, sorry. You will need to give more info for someone to be able to help you.
right, i knew that... i was just... testing you all...
lol im such a noob, since it didn't have MS on it im like oh my gawdz where is it
(Note.. First draft of this guide. When I get a version that can be easily understood then I will link to it in my sig for all to enjoy)
Occasionally someone will take notice of my avatar(or how often I change them) and enquire how I get such great avatars. I just find a picture I like and make it myself. Sometimes this is followed by a request for avatar help. I'll happily oblige by making anyone a simple static avatar, but I would love to see people start doing it for themselves.
It isn't that hard. The only program I usually use is MS Paint. Yes.. it does have uses. I sometimes use a second program to properly preserve the quality of the image, but avatars are so small that it is rare that I ever notice that it made a difference. These days I don't bother transferring it to a separate program.
Step 1- What do I use?!
Finding the base image you want to use. This can be easy or hard depending on how you handle it. I am a picture pack rat. I usually have what I want already on hand on my hard drive. If you aren't a pack rat then Google will happily oblige you. This is really the only step that I can't help much with. If you don't have the image you can't make an avatar.
Step 2- Selecting the avatar area and squaring the image.
I will go ahead and declare this to be the hardest step in the whole process. Seriously.. once you jump this hurdle it is easy. What makes this so hard is that you might need to work out your artistic eye.
Open your selected image in MS Paint. Use the button with the dotted rectangle on it(located at the top of your side toolbar). This will easily select and copy an area of an image you want the avatar to be. Try to square it up by eye right now, but don't worry about exactness. The difficult part comes in deciding how much of the image to include. To much of the original image and people will squint trying to figure out what they are looking at. To little and you miss the important details. Once you are at least somewhat satisfied go ahead and select copy. Don't worry.. you can do this step again if you are unhappy with it later. Open another window for MS Paint(makes it faster if you want to go back to the original and reselect the area). Use the blue boxes on the edge of the white field(middle of the bottom.. middle of the right side.. and the corner) to shrink the white field to smaller than your copied area then paste. The white field will grow to accommodate the pasted image. This is so you don't need to worry about moving the sides till you don't see white.
At the top hit Image then select Attributes. Make sure the Units selected is pixels. Here you will find how large each dimension of your image is. You want to get both numbers the same and have the image square. It doesn't matter how large overall it is at this point. Just try to get the height and width the same number of pixels. In this process you might need to shift around the image itself to cut out various sides(you can use select all and then drag it around before moving in the image area smaller with the blue boxes). This is a bit trial and error. Move and shrink a bit. Check the new pixel size. Use undo from the edit menu if need be. If you find the squared area isn't suitable looking then you might need to go back and select a new area.
Once you have the image squared you are home free. The hard part is OVER.
Step Three: OK.. it is Square.. now what about 80 x 80 pixels?
Once your height and width are the same it is easy. Take note of the pixel size in Attributes(write it down if you need) and grab a calculator(just for ease of the exercise.. your computer should have a built in calculator program).
Divide 8000 by the number of pixels wide(or tall.. doesn't matter because it is square) your image is and round the number you get till there are no decimal points left. Why? Well this is pretty much the end step of an easy process. If you are good with blind devotion then skip past the explanation and save yourself time. 8000/Squared Image Dimension = X. X being a number you need to remember.
The current image area your image is will be represented by Y. You only need one number because.. gasp.. it is square! We did that already so no worries. X is the percentage of the size you need the image to be for it to reach the desired 80 by 80 image. The dimension you want is 80. 100 is the percentage of the size your image is.. to.. itself.
<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
_80_ _X_
Y * 100
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The left side is pixels. The right side is percentages. You supply the number for Y yourself because it is the dimension of your squared image. What you want to find is X.. the percentage 80 is of Y. This is just simple cross multiplying Don't worry, the purpose will be clear in a moment. Because, for this board, you will always want an 80 by 80 image and the squared image is always 100 percent of itself you will end up with 8000 after multiplying the two together. You then divide 8000 by Y. So.. 80*100=8000 then 8000/Y=X.
Round X off till there are no decimals left(MS Paint doesn't like them for this part for some reason). Write down the number or just remember it. Now click Image and Stretch/Skew. A window will open with four fields. You want the top two. It will shrink or grow the image depending on the number you put in. It works off percentage. 110 will make it 110% the size it is now.. thus growing it.. and so on. Put X in the top two fields and just press OK. Check under Attributes and the image should be at or near 80 by 80 pixels. Because MS paint doesn't like decimals.. you might need to press undo and increase or decrease X by one. Preferably, if you can't get it right on 80, you will want it at 81 for height and width. The forums will except it.. it will just compress it unnoticeably.
Appraise the image.. check to see it is the proper size under attributes. Make sure you are happy with what you can see. Now that you know what to do repeating it will be easy. Just find something you are happy with(this is why the second step is so hard.. selecting the initial area to edit down determines what the avatar will be later on). Click save as and save it somewhere you can find it. Make sure you change it from the default format to a jpg image format.
Upload it to photo bucket or image shack or any web space you can link from and upload the image. Insert the proper link in the options for the forum and you have yourself an avatar. It might not be animated(there are some very helpful folk which shrink animated images down very fast), but you made it yourself. Thumbs up.. you have self reliance!