Silk Dress Tutorial

Please note: These are just my ways of doing things in Paint. I don't use it very much, so there may be easier/quicker ways to do what I am doing, feel free to play around!

1. 1. You will need a base to work with. If you don't already have one, go to my bases section and save one onto your PC. You may want to complete my preparing your base tutorial before we start.	2. I have created several colour palettes that you can use, but you are free to use your own colours, or use on of my other palettes. I have labelled the colours on the palettes to make them a bit easier to pick.	3. Once in Paint, click on the Brush tool and choose the smallest brush size. You could use the Pencil tool instead, if you want, but I always find the Brush easier as you just have the "cross-hair" cursor and thins makes it much easier to see what you are actually doing.

4. Select the darkest shade from the palette and draw the outline of the dress. You may find it easier to zoom in a little to do this. You can do this as many times as you need to - it can be a little tricky to get the right shape. Just remember - you can only undo 3 moves! TIP: Press CTRL+Z to Undo and F4 to Redo - it's much quicker!	5. Don't worry of the edges are a little messy. Just use white to tidy up the edges so that it is 1 pixel think at all points and has a nice, smooth outline. Where the dress goes over the body, use the Pick Colour tool to select the skin shade closest to the outline & tidy up any stray pixels. TIP: Drawing with the Right Mouse Button will draw in the background colour.	6. Select colour 3 from the palette and colour in the interior of the dress - it may be slightly quicker if you use the Fill tool for the large, blank areas & then set you brush size larger for large areas with many different colours, e.g. the legs.

7. Use the Pick Colour tool to select the darkest shade again and drew in where the shading would be i.e. in the folds of the dress, around the waist, under & to the sides of the bust.	8. Using palette colour 2, draw about 2 pixels thick of shading against the shading you added in the step above and the edge of the dress. This just softens the shading & blends it in a bit. I have shown this in green above to make it easier for you to see what I mean.	9. Your doll should look something like this so far.

10. Use the Pick Colour tool to select the lightest shade of the palette. Draw in where the very shiniest parts of the dress would be i.e the bits that "stick out" the most.	11. Use palette colour 5 to edge the highlight you drew just drew in. You should Zoom out a lot while doing this to make sure the shading looks smooth.	12. Use palette colour 4 to smooth the highlight together with the rest of the dress by outline the highlight where necessary.

Just add a face, some hair & accessories & your doll is complete!
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