PAINT A DINGBAT

There are several ways to paint dingbats, depending on your image. With experience you will learn what works best for your image or your experience level. You can use any or all of these methods on a single image.

ANNOTATE COLOR

Most dingbats are transparent. Hence only the outline can be painted in the Annotate stage and most of these look best in black. A colored dingbat however can be painted using the fill color. Some of these can be further embellished with a stroke color as well (but not too many--you'll have to experiment with them). A painted hand for example can be fill color salmon and stroke color black. The stroke width can be widened by putting a 1 in that box, but 0 will work as well for a thin outline.

PAINT BY POINT AND CLICK

On the bottom of the Main Page at the IM Studio you will see a paint option. This is a point and click method for painting your image. You will need to type in the fill color. You can get a choice of colors by clicking on the word Color. Leave Floodfill as it is--this floods the image from the point where you clicked it up to the border, such as inside a shirt to the outlines of the shirt. Occasionally you may have to click on it twice to get full coverage, if the border blocks complete coverage. Similarly you have to be careful that the image has a border, otherwise the color will spread on to the background. Those are best painted by painting the background and annotating on to it. Next click on color in the drop down box to fill with color. Then click on your image and point to the part that you want to fill with paint.

PAINT BY BACKGROUND

If your want a peachpuff face and red shirt, you should probably place the shirt on first on to a red background. Change the background color to peachpuff and then annotate the face, if your using a face dingbat. Another problem however that you run into is that the collar is showing through the face. This will have to be erased out of the image. One good way to erase it it to annotate on to it using a font. A good font to use is Oregon Normal with the asterick. It make a dot as large or small as you like. It is in the jump box of fonts on the Annotate page. If you use this you will have to leave the URL box empty because that will over-ride the font. The fill color of your eraser should be the same as the background color. You can erase right over the face to make it blank and then annotate the face again on top of that at the same parameters as before.

PAINT EACH PART SEPARATE

A last way is to paint each piece of your image separately, upload each image and then put them all together on to a background. You won't need to erase anything this way, just composite a colored image on to a colored image in the order that they will appear, with background to foreground. You will need to try to size them as close as possible to each other. This can be done by making a rough draft of your image with all your dingbats and jotting down all your parameters and then going back and starting over with each part of the image and outputing it to your site. Then composite it under the Composite button. Go to the IM Studio with a background. Put the URL of your colored dingbat parts individually in to the space. You will use Over throughout and that is already showing. The offset parameters works just like the Annotate parameters, width and height, North or South, etc. You would also have to have a transparent background on each image.

TRANSPARENT BACKGROUND

To make your background transparent after you have finished painting and annotating an image, you can go to the Paint Option at the Main IM page. Keep floodfill in there. Choose Matte from the drop down list on the right. In fill color leave it blank, or none. Then click anywhere on the background of your image and the color should be removed. Sometimes the images seem to have a halo of the removed color around them which is not apparent until you get to the output page on the black screen. If this happens you can hit your back button to go all the way back to before you made the background transparent (or repaint it the original color) and then put a number in the Fuzz option. You can use numbers anywhere from 300 to 10,000 or higher. This number tells the program how much color variation from the original color you would like to remove. 5000 usually works well with a solid background and a clear border image. Put too high a number and your image could be removed along with the background, especially if the border is not far off in color from the background (hot pink on red for example). But you can hit the back button and change the number.