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Style I: Easy Patterns
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1. Open the image of a petz to work with.
*** Note: Notice how the petz above doesn't have a lot of texture. While the body has a slight speckle, there are no spots or tatoos [which are complex fur patterns]. As far as I am concerned, I am looking at three major colours; offwhite, auburnish red, & pink (for the nose).
2. Before we move on, we need to make two new raster layers. Call one of them "Ink" and the other "Filler." Arange them so that this is the order from top to bottom: 1) Ink, 2) Filler, 3) Background [Petz Picture]
3. After the layers are set, it's time to choose a tool. Click on the paint brush  & adjust the preset to a square, sized at 2 pixels. Make sure that the "Ink" layer is highlighted from the right-hand menu before going on!
4. Now comes the fun part! Using the petz as a guide, simply trace around the different pockets of colours. It will end up looking like a really thick outline.
Here are Some Tips for "Inking" the Outline:
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a) It doesn't matter what colour you use, so long as you can see it. |
b) Whether or not the eyes should be excluded from this process is a matter of style. For this dogs, the eyes made the whole thing look to complicated, so I scratched right through them. |
c) DO NOT try and get every little hair, a general outline will do just fine. |
d) Connect the lines for each colour pocket. Don't leave any holes. |
e) This requires a steady hand. I find that using a tablet & stylus works wonders! |
5. Next, use the magic wand tool to select the ALL pockets at once. To do this requires grabing more than one section at a time. For a shortcut, I like to hold the "Shift" key down and click arond the different areas. Remember, DO NOT click on the outline - but rather within the spaces inbetween it.
6. Select the "Filler" layer from the right-hand menu. Nothing should happen to the image.
7. At this point, we need to make the colour patches uniform. Choose the Dropper Tool (or eye dropper)  & take a sample from one of the patches. Then use the Flood Tool  to fill that same area. Repeat this process for the other patches.
| ~ A Helpful Hint ~ | | A neat little keyboard trick for switching between these two features is to click on the Flood Tool and hold down the "Shift" key when the dropper is needed. Release the key, and the flood tool should come back. |
8. Turn off and/or delete the "Ink" & "Background" layers. Simple, no? ;)
9. Wala! A petz foam stamp! Now all you need to do is save (as a .gif to retain transparency) or export. :D
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