feel free to roast me or steal my idea and make it good
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1yr ago
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#173310
I made my first Marsey. I used MS Paint and PPT lol
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very good first Marsey
I'd consider adding a white border around it to match most other Marseys and makes it pop out on dark backgrounds
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Agreed its a great marse. I've been using the stroke selection w/gimp (on an underlying layer) once I have the outline +feathering +del background to get the right thickness, but sometimes it still yields choppy results, dyk if there a better way to round everything off? (I know it often doesn't matter though when it's scaled to 200px across but still lol)
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wtf I wish I was that good w/MS paint
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What I do is usually magic want select by alpha (so you select everything but the transparent bits, then selection->grow usually by about 5 pixels but it depends on how big your marsey is, obviously. Then I create a new layer under the marsey and fill it with white outline. That also sometimes gives some choppy results, but you can usually turn on "feather edges" for a few pixels in the selection tool to then smooth it out a bit. It's not perfect, but it's fast and it tends to work more times than not for me
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Same! I was kind of doing that before I learned about stroke selection and it's a sort of tossup in quality though, just a bit easier than the method your talking about.
Kinda suspect some of our more accomplished martists use a vector method but I haven't taken the dive into yet tbh.
any tips for the smoooothest black/white outlines?
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For the smoothest outlines you need smooth lines, no way around that as far as I know. Vector graphics are the best way to get smooth lines. But I'm an absolute troglodyte who can't work with vectors, I draw my Marseys mostly by hand.
There are probably much better methods out there but I made this quick guide on how I do my outlines:
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SORRY this got buried in pings, holy shit thank you so much for the step by step Sylveon!!
I think me and
@Dramamine have similar approaches with growing the outline or doing a trace w/gimp or something, I really need to give http://paint.net a chance because (not to humblebrag) gimp is a b-word to use in 4k because nothing scales right.
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I made that guide because it's not intuitive at all. Like
@Dramamine, I used http://paint.net for over a decade and I didn't know that was a thing, even back when I used http://paint.net as my main software for making Marseys.
I switched to Krita but I still prefer using http://paint.net for outlines and cropping. Not the most convenient method but I can vouch for its stability and quality.
I got curious and I made a comparison with Krita's stroke effect:
For this Marsey both look fine. http://Paint.net looks a bit smoother but won't make a noticeable difference once uploaded and scaled.
This Sylveon drawing had its background removed and was never meant to have an outline. While a niche case, I'll definitely have an easier time cleaning up the http://paint.net one.
Not to diss on the stroke effect, of course, it has more practical uses.
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ahh yeah I see! Thank you for doing the 1:1 experiment and the extra effort to demo!!! This is exactly the kind of weird details I obsess over with sometimes hahaha
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I use gimp's stroke a lot, but what the frick happened here on krita?
I've never
had it spaz out that badly. Mostly transparent pixels 
that happened to get outlined?
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That's what happened, I used a "charcoal" brush on that drawing so it has a lot of leftover pixels that are pretty much invisible.
I'm not sure if GIMP works like this since I have limited experience with it, but on Krita the stroke is a "Layer Style" effect that can be applied to individual or group layers.
I guess it's worth noting that Krita presents itself as an illustration software first, many of its features are tailored for r-slurs who want to draw.
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Oh neat, I didn't know http://paint.net even had that despite
using it for over a decade at this point.
Between http://paint.net, kirta, and gimp I really wish they would
get a proper format that let me freely switch 
between 
them freely because they all suck at a bunch of things
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Idk I draw the outline on the lowest layer. On mobile so cowtools are limited.
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PPT? As in PowerPoint? How
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yeah. its actually really easy to copy things from paint to ppt and then use all the rotation, layers, scaling, shadow, etc features in ppt. but it's easier to draw and crop and color and stuff in paint. you don't even need to save intermediate steps, just select whatever and copy back and forth
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well, if it ain't broke, I guess
have you tried http://paint.net?
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This neighbor has never done ghetto image editing in powerpoint.
It's actually pretty convenient for super simple stuff because stuff you add in PPT is vector based and if you're familiar with any MS Office interfaces, then your cowtools are all in the same place. I did that a lot as a student when I needed to just make some quick presentation slides because I could usually get it done faster than GIMP would open.
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cute!
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I made some changes based on your suggestions
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make sure to submit it to get your 250 coins (and don't use too many tags or it'll be rejected)
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I make all my diagrams in PowerPoint because I've never put the effort into learning Visio. I convert it to pdf and nones the wiser.
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A "trick" I like to use when making Marsey edits is cutting out part of the prop and then add that part on a new layer above/in-front of the Marsey. This way I can make it look like Marsey is wearing something, or make it look like she is behind something in a way that makes sense.
Consider cutting out part of the front rim of the hat and add it back on top of Marsey's head so that it looks like she is wearing the hat and not standing in-front of it. Hope this advice made sense.
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Having the ears poke through the hat is a relatively easy way of getting that effect too.
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I like it! Do another!
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Switch to http://paint.net
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But I'm going to need assurance in this form: ground your son. Don't ever let him use rdrama.net again. Take his phone. Rdrama.net is super toxic because it's about enjoying and creating internet drama. For your kids sake don't let him use it
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