hey Nala,

I actually did the sketching and the line art in Microsoft Paint. and I actually took screen captures of my process!

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this was the beginning of my sketch in MSPaint. VERY rough in a color other than black. I just used the single-pixel pencil tool.

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then I started working on the actual lines in black. still very rough. as I finished each line to my satisfaction, I removed excess pixels to make a neat, 1-pixel-wide line.

cleaning up a sketch in MSPaint like this and removing all the turquoise is very easy. you just pick turquoise as your color and use the paint bucket tool to fill in the shape. then use the paint bucket tool to make it white. if you click back and forth between turquoise and white, inside and outside of the outlines, eventually you won't have any turquoise lines left.

that probably doesn't make any sense. @_@ but here's what I wound up with when I finished the line art:

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very clean.

then I moved to Paint Shop Pro. I used Paint Shop Pro 6, which isn't as advanced as PSP 8 (I imagine). I used the paint brush tool with a brush tip of 1 pixel, hardness of 0, opacity 100%, and density 100%. but mostly I just used the paint bucket/color fill tool.

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I filled areas with colors to my satisfaction, and then used the paint tool to outline areas that should be in shadow; then I used the fill tool to fill in those colors.

to make the image look less cartoony, though, I also colored the black line art to make the outlines blend in more with the color they enclosed. to do this, I used the lasso selection tool to specifically select the parts of the outline that I wanted to change colors. then I picked PSP's color replacing tool, chose black as the background color and a new color as the foreground color, and double-clicked within my lasso selection. I did this over and over with every area of outlines.

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once both the fawn and the figure were complete, I had to move the fawn on top of the figure. you can do this by selecting (with the lasso tool or with the rectangle select) the figure you want to move. to make the selection conform to your figure, make sure that the background color for your entire image is specified as your current palette background color. then go to selections -> modify -> transparent color. pick "background color" as your transparent color, then hit "okay." now you will be able to drag pieces of the image over other pieces of the image.

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I essentially just selected the resulting figure and dragged it over the blank template background.

I realize that this tutorial I just gave you is PRETTY WORTHLESS without screen captures of everything I just talked about. @_@ if I have time later and you're having trouble following what I wrote, I may be able to make you a full tut, but it may take some time.

hope at least some of this helps though~

I too a sucker for pixels. after five years playing with oekaki, pixels have FINALLY bitten me! how did this happen?