It also gets tedious having straight tails all around, it’s nice to throw a curveball every now and then. I usually use those through out my comics to give a sense of flow-iness. My issues came when getting a curvy tailed speech balloon. A nice, straight-laced boi:īut I never had any issues with this boi. Switch the colour to the desired border colour, in this case I chose black, and go to Select > Draw Selection Border…Ĭhoose On Boundary and select the desired thicccness, in this case I chose 2 pixels:Īnd voila! Notice how that tail has no rounded edges near the end and there’s a consistent border all around. Make sure that the Reference is set to layer. Get the Bucket tool and fill the selection with the balloon’s desired background colour, in this case I chose white. Then, switch to Polygon shape to create the straight tail by making a triangle shape: Preferably around the text you’re trying to balloon: Using the Select tool, create an Ellipse selection on your canvas. Enjoy!įirst, let’s get the easy one out of the way: the straight tailed speech balloons. However, I think I found a way to make it look gooder, which I will be outlining below. While I love this burning long-necked mammal, I still had trouble getting speech balloons to look…good. I’ve been working with Paint.NET for a long, long time, but I realized how much it lacked in terms of brushes and other capabilities.
How to use firealpaca with a mouse free#
Speech Balloon Tutorial in FireAlpaca (feel free to press “j” to skip, it’s a long one) Just be careful, if it’s something that’s not transparent (the grey becomes transparent in 8-bit more), it will be colored the color you pick without any change. After the conversion, you can lock the transparency and use the colors you wanted on the splotches of color. The colors will not magically pop back up or be “restored”, because the markings you left there will already be black-and-white, but this is just useful to know if this happens but you’ve already drawn something there that you don’t want to erase. so if you take your existing 8-bit/1-bit layer and go to the top menus - Layer>Convert>color layer, you’ll be able to make it into a regular layer. You can also convert your layers into oter layer types. If you get pixelated edges for the lines and coloring you make, it’s a 1-bit layer. If you pick a medium-light color and it becomes gray, that means you have most likely an 8-bit layer. When you Rasterize a drawing, you can also set it to be a grayscale version of this and to do this, FA will use the 8-bit layer mode to display the flattened image. The “blank new layer” button should say “Add layer” and the others would be “Add Layer (8bpp/1bpp)”.Ĩ-bit is often used for lineart (for those that want to dedicacte the layer to just black-white-grey) and 1-bit can be used very well for pixel art (works only with “hard” / non-watercolor/smudging brushes) and I’ve seen it used for screentones as well. It could also be that when you made the new file, you set the first layer to be 8-bit - make sure to select “color layer” from where it says “Initial layer” - this way you can also avoid confusion about what layers you are using in your file.Īlso, to make your life a bit easier, I suggest setting an easy to access shortcut for “new layer” - I use Shift+A myself because I was used to it from another program and it is easy to access with my left hand without using the mouse/tablet for something basic like this.Īt the bottom of your program is also a little “tip bar” - if you hover over a button or tool, it will usually tell you what these things are. Please make sure to make “new color layer” or just “new layer” instead of those two. The first button at the bottom of that window is a blank “page” icon though - that is the default layer you usually start the file with. At the bottom of the layer window, they are marked by a 8 and 1, respectively. When you see it in the layer window, In the corner of that layer it should have a black little square with a tiny number on its side to show you that it’s a different kind of layer. Hi! it sounds like you have made a 8-bit or 1-bit layer. Then I want to paint the inside but the color just stays black no matter what color I change to or what layer I paint on. I mean, I make the first layer with the skatch and then on other layer I go over it with the pen brush.
How to use firealpaca with a mouse how to#
Im new at firealpaca and I just cant understand how to use colors. Hey!! I need your help so bad, I cant find a solution to my problem.