Teefury

I use PaintShop Pro, a later version (It's now owned by Corel). If you get the latest version X4 direct from Corel.com, you should be fine. It's really cheap providing you buy the digital edition from the US site. It tries to charge me the British Price in pounds here in the UK, but I can buy direct from the US site and it's much cheaper. It's $40 at the moment which isn't a bad price. You can do almost all the regular things that the ridiculously expensive Adobe Photoshop can do, and it's way easier to use. (I own all the Adobe programs too, but I still mostly use PaintShop Pro to create my designs as I find it much faster)

Anyway, the best way to create designs in PaintShop Pro is at pretty high resolution 3000x3000 pixels or larger and in Layers. Layers allow you, as the name suggests, to manipulate different layers of the same image without damaging other layers. This technique is very useful when for example tracing your own hand drawn scanned in images.

PaintShop Pro also has a fairly easy to use vector pen tool, although if you know nothing about vectors I would not try to tackle this too early on as it will frustrate you unless you've got some knowledge of it. Vectors allow you to scale things up and down smoothly which can be very useful if you need a very high resolution image.

The best procedure for creating designs in PaintShop Pro is to save your art on your computer in its .pspimage format. Although other programs cannot normally open these files, it will preserve your ability to edit the different layers. It's also the only format that properly preserves the ability to edit vectors in the image, if you used any. Once you have your final design Save it again as .pspimage but then also export a different copy in whichever format is suited to the company that wants to print your design. eg. .png or .psd.

Save Often when working on a design, and as it progresses save incremental versions under new filenames. I use NameOfMyDesignV1, NameOfMyDesignV2, NameOfMyDesignV3 etc so if I advance too far and I don't like the way it's turned out I can always reload an older version and start from that point.

Beyond that, almost everything else is down to your own drawing skills and ideas.

I created a list of tips some time ago that you may find useful here Tips for Aspiring Artists

Good Luck. :)

Hey Thanks so much for the tips & I will definately check out that list of yer's as well. Was funny you bringing up vectors. Man,they were a pain to figure out on my own when I first got psp...the vastness of all the things you can do can make ones' head go BANG! lol I might have to purchase the new version you mentioned,as this one I have is Flintstone-esque. Thanks again for the help.

Chuffy said: I use PaintShop Pro, a later version (It's now owned by Corel). If you get the latest version X4 direct from Corel.com, you should be fine. It's really cheap providing you buy the digital edition from the US site. It tries to charge me the British Price in pounds here in the UK, but I can buy direct from the US site and it's much cheaper. It's $40 at the moment which isn't a bad price. You can do almost all the regular things that the ridiculously expensive Adobe Photoshop can do, and it's way easier to use. (I own all the Adobe programs too, but I still mostly use PaintShop Pro to create my designs as I find it much faster)

Anyway, the best way to create designs in PaintShop Pro is at pretty high resolution 3000x3000 pixels or larger and in Layers. Layers allow you, as the name suggests, to manipulate different layers of the same image without damaging other layers. This technique is very useful when for example tracing your own hand drawn scanned in images.

PaintShop Pro also has a fairly easy to use vector pen tool, although if you know nothing about vectors I would not try to tackle this too early on as it will frustrate you unless you've got some knowledge of it. Vectors allow you to scale things up and down smoothly which can be very useful if you need a very high resolution image.

The best procedure for creating designs in PaintShop Pro is to save your art on your computer in its .pspimage format. Although other programs cannot normally open these files, it will preserve your ability to edit the different layers. It's also the only format that properly preserves the ability to edit vectors in the image, if you used any. Once you have your final design Save it again as .pspimage but then also export a different copy in whichever format is suited to the company that wants to print your design. eg. .png or .psd.

Save Often when working on a design, and as it progresses save incremental versions under new filenames. I use NameOfMyDesignV1, NameOfMyDesignV2, NameOfMyDesignV3 etc so if I advance too far and I don't like the way it's turned out I can always reload an older version and start from that point.

Beyond that, almost everything else is down to your own drawing skills and ideas.

I created a list of tips some time ago that you may find useful here Tips for Aspiring Artists

Good Luck. :)

Vectors can be quite baffling, which is why they are best avoided to begin with. They bear little relation to tradition methods of drawing like using pen and paper. Which makes it kinda laughable that they call the vector drawing tool the Pen tool.

In PaintShop Pro you should definitely use fonts as vectors though, as this will give you the ability to control and edit the appearance over and over. Vector fonts are very easy to use (unlike the Pen tool) and should not make your head explode. :)