How to Cel a Doll ... by Moni-chan Hey peeps, this is my way of making my dolls - it may not be the best but it is fast and is also quite space saving. This way will also make sure that your doll is not Enhanced. Everything here is done in MSPaintbrush - other programs can be used ... that is discussed in Drawing Tips in detail and also discussed slightly in here as well. The Program I like to use is WSVC, I think it saves time and is easy to use ... it took me ten tons of time before I figured it out, though. WSVC can be found on The Big Kiss Page (in the Tools Section). So here we go. Any questions, comments? E-mail me at dodgeli@aicom.com ***Table of Contents: I Before you start drawing II Drawing base doll and clothes III Using WSVC IV Making your palette V Good tips for drawing *** Before you start drawing 1. Make sure your paintbrush files are in 256 color mode NOT 24 color bitmap. WSVC does not read 24 color bitmap files, and it causes a LOT of confusion. (You can tell when you save the file) 2. Make sure you have boxes around every single cel (not necessarily very close to the cel, but not leaving too much space - causes huge files for no reason) *** Drawing base doll and clothes 1. Draw your base doll; usually without clothes on, but it's my preference to leave out the nudity. Make sure you select a color for the background ... red, green, blue, something that matches with the doll and not a color you want to use in your clothes (explained in Drawing tip #2). This is the background color you will use in ALL your bmp files. 2. Save the picture of the doll in a file *doll.bmp* 3. Now, copy the doll and delete everything about the doll except for the outline of arms, legs, face, whatever. Even remove the coloring. 4. Make sure you keep the outline safe. This will be used for drawing your clothes. 5. Copy the outline and paste it somewhere else in the bitmap. You can draw your clothes on this one. If you mess up, you can delete the bad version and recopy the outline of the doll and redraw the clothes! 6. After you are finish drawing, let's say a shirt, you can delete the rest of the outline that you don't need. So you have the shirt left. 7. Keep drawing clothes for the doll. If you find that you have so many clothes that one bitmap file is too large, open another bitmap: copy your doll and the outline of the doll into the new bitmap, and you're ready to start drawing again. 8. Make sure all your clothes have a box around them - not around each outfit, around each piece of separate clothing: a shirt, a gown, shoes. *** Using WSVC Note: There is a tutorial in WSVC, with pictures to go along with it. I will explain everything again here, but I warn you that the main reason it does not seem to work is that your bmp file isn't in 256 color mode. Various error messages in WSVC happen to be: a) Not support format (must be in 256 color mode) b) Warning! Same file exists. Overwrite? (there is a cel or kcf file in your folder that has the same name as one of the names of your cels in your current WSVC file) 1. File ... Open (your picture file) 2. Click on the little box at the bottom left hand corner. It will pop up a small screen. Filename: the name of the cel Save directly: into which folder your cel will go. Clip lower and right hand edges: exactly what it says; it won't take away any of your picture, it will make the size smaller. Offset: if you want the cel to be the size of the rectangle exactly, then check this button. It will not clip anypart of the picture, even if it is blank. (WSVC won't offset for you by itself unless you put a tiny dot at the top left hand corner, one pixel away from the left edge, and connected to the top edge) 3. Name all your cels, choose all the options you want. 4. Don't do anything about the color palette. If you create a palette for each and every cel file *** Making your palette 1. Gather little blocks of all the colors you have. You can do this by cutting and pasting. What I like to do is to find all the colors I can, I've found over 100 out of 256 colors, and then put them in one file. I will use this file as my palette file, because it has all of my colors. See drawing tip #3 2. Put a big rectangle of any color around your color samples. Go into WSVC, and just rename the palette file to Palette.kcf. Now make everything, cel and all, and you have a palette file that's not enhanced, but will have all of your colors! 3. Or, draw everything in Paintshop Pro or a similar program and use all the colors you want. Later just convert it to 256 colors. You'll lose a lot of colors that way though ^.^ *** Good tips for drawing 1. Usually, I like to avoid big bitmap files because they are slow to work with. I put the doll in one bmp file, the shirts in another, the pants in another. Gowns often take two bmp files .. but you needn't work with so many clothes in the beginning. Just do a few to make sure you know how to do the process first. 2. In MS Paint, you may notice a tool used for selecting colors. In the Win95/98 version, you will be able to see that tool right next to the magnifying glass. You can select it, then go to the picture, point at any color you like in it (any place on the pic) and click ... and voila you have seleced the color. This is if you right click. If you left click, the color will be selected as the *background color.* Something that is very useful. You usually don't want your doll to have a white background. The background color means that any clothes that are the background color will be 100% transparent. That means only the outline is left, you won't be able to see the color at all. This, now, can be very annoying, so choose your background color carefully. 3. You don't have to just use MSPaint. I often use Paintshop Pro for many of my textures. However, there isn't too much choice, because you are only in 256 color mode.