In this tutorial we will try to explain step by step how to Trace a Drawing or Painting in MS Paint and all its features.
To get the most out of this training, following this content and our previous and subsequent or other related trainings that we publish in series will help you understand and achieve much more.
We open MS Paint and start with a clean and blank canvas with a white background color.
The photo of the Felix Cat sketch we drew with a real pencil on a real paper is on DESKTOP.
We will prepare this sketch photo in MS Paint for the image tracing we will do in a moment.
The easiest way to do this is to drag and drop it into the open MS Paint program, or you can also open it from the file options.
Whether it’s drawings you’ve made on real paper or surfaces, or drawings or images you’ve created or acquired digitally, we can use the Trace to Image method in MS Paint for all of them, the choice is entirely up to you.
You can apply the tracing method to any image or painting or photo image that you can open in MS Paint.
Here we will use the felix cat trials that we have already drawn on paper.
We decide on one of the drawings in the photo, select it with the free selection tool and then crop it with the crop command.
First, we enlarge the canvas area to make it easier to work on the selected drawing.
We have provided enough space and in the next step we enlarge the drawing itself with resize commands.
We will use the curve tool to manually trace the drawing to reveal the outline.
With the Curve tool we can emphasize curved and bent lines more beautifully.
Before that there is a problem that we have to mention, our current drawing photo is very dark because it was taken without enough light.
And the whites are not light white and there are also very dark colors close to black, so when we choose the Black color, the colors will blend together and it will be hard to distinguish.
Here we will try an alternative technique for the solution: We will place a rectangular white shape filled with a marker pen as a layer on top of the drawing image to brighten and whiten the image in MS Paint.
In this way, the rectangular mask, half light and half filled with a transparent marker pen, will lighten and whiten all dark colors by several degrees.
With this translucent white mask, it will now be easier and more distinguishable to see a black colored drawing on the image.
We erased the other parts of the canvas that needed to be erased and started tracing the drawing with the curve tool.
We thickened it a bit so that our lines would be distinct.
We have previous content explaining the detailed and basic use of the Curve tool, please watch that content first, so that you can understand this and subsequent content more effectively and completely.
Using the step-by-step image tracing, we started outlining our drawing with the curve tool.
If you pay attention, you will notice that we occasionally make mistakes in presenting these steps in an accelerated way.
But this is not a problem because there are many ways to undo errors, especially using shortcuts to undo and pick up where we left off.
When using the Curve tool, if we have made a mistake during the creation phase, clicking the right mouse button will be enough to cancel the error.
But if we have created our drawing incorrectly, we use the undo option to cancel the drawing.
We undo with our favorite key combination (Control, + Z), which we explained in more detail in previous tutorials.
Once our outlines are complete, we run the invert colors command.
The Invert colors command will automatically change our blackest outline to white for a clearer color separation in the next step.
Save the current scene as a backup and open the Properties options under the File menu.
In the feature options we choose between color and black and white format.
In image files converted to black and white format, the gray areas outside the black and white disappear, so that the outline of our drawing appears cleanly.
When we get to this stage, we take another backup and change the color properties from black and white to color.
And of course on the Canvas, with the Invert colors command, we revert our outline lines from white back to the original black color.
Using the bucket tool, we fill in the necessary colors in the required areas.
Now we can move on to the detailed part, we want some lines to look sharper, so we shape the lines with the curve tool using contrasting colors.
We change the position of the drawing we created to save space on our canvas.
And finally, we take screenshots on canvas of the important steps we have taken up to this point.
If you haven’t seen it, we recommend you watch the previous and subsequent tutorials in the series.
We will continue the series with more beautiful trainings and we will be with you again very soon.
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