Making Grabpics in Paint Shop Pro 7.

By Gary Gadsdon

I know that Matt has posted a tutorial for drawing Grabpics in Paint Shop Pro 7, but what the heck, everyone has a very unique style to drawing, so here's my style.

1. First up, you need a framegrab, nearly any framegrab will work, for this example, I'll be using this framegrab of Lisa Simpson;

It goes without saying that the better quality framegrab you use, the better results you will get and the easier it will draw.

2. Next up is to crop the framegrab of what you dont need. Select the Marquee tool on the tool bar going down the side. And drag out a rectangular box around Lisa.

Then hit Shift+R to crop the image.

3. To make the grabpic drawable you need to enlarge the picture. I tend to enlarge them to 1200 px wide, and let the program do the height for me. You can go Image > Image Size, but I just take the keyboard shortcut of Shift+S. Type in "1200" in the width box, and make sure that asspect ratio is turned on and left at whatever it says. You'll have something like this.

It may not look any different, but thats because it automatically zooms out. If you have a scroll wheel on your mouse use that to zoom in and out.

4. Next up create a layer to draw on. Go Layers > Create New Raster Layer, you can give the layer if you want, but I tend not to because you only need one. So Leave it as "Layer1".

5. Now you need to set your tools. Select the Draw tool on the side menu in the draw options, set your brush to 6, have anti-alias on and create as vector off. Make sure you have your new layer selected.

6. In the colour pallettes off to the right, make sure that you have the stroke colour at black and the background at transparent. You can change betwee, Solid, Gradient, Pattern and Transparent by using the black arrows in the bottom corner of the block.

7. Now its time to start drawing. Click on an area of the picture, I tend to start with the hair, but here I'll use the pearls as a starting point, and drag out a line.

With that drawn, you'll need to shape your lines, on the starting point (where you clicked your mouse) drag it out to shape it.

Then do the same on the point where you let go.

Then release your mouse and the line will become solid.

Keep drawing until you've done the whole outer edge. And it will look something like this;

Dont worry if yours doesnt look good, practice makes perfect, I also consiously make mistakes so that I can tell easier when one of my grabpics has been stolen by another website. Notice that I havent drawn in the pupils. We use a tool called the "Preset Shapes" for that.

8. Change your colour pallettes around by using the arrows between the stroke and fill blocks. This will make the fill colour black and the stroke transparent. And Click the button to go into preset mode. Set to the Elipse shape, turn vector off, and anti-aliasing on, you can have it at any width it wont matter.

9. Draw in the pupils.

Making your grabpic have a complete outline.

10. Now we need to colour. Set the stroke pallette to the Simpsons Yellow, I use #FFCC31. Click the black block and type in #FFCC31 in the HTML box.

Select the Magic Wand tool and select the areas that you want to be yellow. Then you'll need to expand the selection by 1 px (6 for black) Go, Selections > Expand Selection > 1px, then use the fill bucket to fill in the areas you want coloured. . DO NOT COLOUR ANYTHING WHITE.

11. With that done you can delete the background, go into the Layer Properties, right click the background and select "Delete"

12. Zoom to 1:1 by clicking the in the top bar.

13. Reduce the size down. I'd say around 500 height.

14. When you've done that, hit Ctrl+Shift+3 and then enter twice. And now all the white parts are filled in.

15. Last up is to save it,

Be sure that you save it as a CompuServe Graphics Interchange file (.GIF) with a reasonable file name, Image1.gif isnt any good. And you'll have a file that everyone can enjoy like this;