This is an incredibly useful trick I’ve learnt for turning non-Paint friendly (PF) lines into paint friendly lines. Unfortunately, Spirit Source can only handle images that are under a certain size (I think it’s something like 1000x1000 pixels). Anything bigger will get resized to fit onto the site, and that includes linearts and blank renders. So, even if you made your lineart/blank render Paint friendly when drawing it, if it’s too big SS will resize it, pixelating the image and making it non-Paint friendly. But don’t worry! That’s where this handy tutorial comes in ^^
As always, I’ll be using Gimp 2.8 in this tutorial, but these steps are pretty much universal to all versions of Gimp.
Step 1: Get your non-Paint friendly lineart/blank render. I have found that this works for thin (1 pixel thick) lines and thick (more than 2 pixel thick) lines. The only thing it won’t work for is if your lineart/blank render already has a background, so choose one with a blank/plain background, like this.
If you zoom into the image, you’ll see that the black lines are surrounded by grey/blurred edges.
If you try to fill in the colour in these lines, this will happen.
Step 2: Since we don’t want that, simply click on the tab that’s says ‘Colors’ above your image, go down to ‘Threshold’ and click on it.
Step 3: A box will appear called ‘Apply Threshold’. You may notice that your lines automatically get clearer/sharper as soon as you click ‘Threshold’. If not, or if you just want to sharpen the lines further, click on the little black triangle underneath the big white and blue bar in the middle of the box, and drag it to the left or the right. Your black outlines will get thicker or thinner depending on which way you drag the triangle. Once you are happy with it, click the ‘OK’ button at the bottom of the box.
You may find that your lines now have gaps in them, so it’s best to have a look over your lines now and fill in any gaps that might have appeared. Once you’ve done that you can now colour your image. If you now use the Fill bucket tool, your image should fill cleanly, like this
And that’s it; it really is as easy as that. I’ve tried it on lots of different linearts/blank renders, and it’s worked on every one. You might like to experiment with the Apply threshold box until you’re happy with the result, and the lines will not be exactly as they were when they were originally drawn, but it’s a very useful trick if you’ve only got non-Paint friendly lines to use.
Render © me
_________________
Huge thank you to Roiffalo for help with sorting out my signature ^^
