Yes, I realize that there's already a tutorial for scanlines, yet that requires Photoshop. This is simply using paint/Microsoft word.
EDIT: Oh yeah, I think I was supposed to give this a difficulty rating. It's really basic, so I guess it'd be 1/5 for the hardness level...
Mkay, most people see paint as being completely worthless with absolutely no way to make something look nice in it. That’s basically the reason behind why I’m creating this, simply to show that you can get some more photoshop-ish effects with even the most basic programs. Anyone who has Microsoft Word and MS paint on their computer can now make scanlines.
Right. Final Product:
Something like this.
Okay, to start out, take the picture of your choice and paste it into paint.
http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g1...g?t=1168902152
^That’s the picture I’ve chosen for starting.
Then, resize and crop the picture as you choose to do so until you have the section prepared as you want it to look when you’ve finished.
Your window should now look something like this. Because you’ll soon be moving several things around the screen, be sure to leave a fair amount of empty space. Keep the base of the signature towards the corner for now so that it’s easy to go back if you make a mistake. Keep in mind that paint is a fairly basic program and that you can only undo three things in a row.
After you have cut the picture down as needed, draw a black square (any other color works, but I like black). Make sure your plain black square is a good deal larger then you plan to make the finished signature.
Once you have drawn your square/rectangle, begin to draw the pattern you intend to make on the black space in yellow. Keep in mind the colors in your picture. Try to pick a color that contrasts with the rest of the colors in the picture so that the picture turns out well. Anyways, begin to draw on the pattern onto the black square. To keep this simple, start out by doing one line yellow, one line turned black. On line yellow, one line black. An alternating pattern is easy to create. Consider using the zoom feature (the icon looks like a magnifying glass) to help keep lines steady. After you have one or two lines drawn, consider using the tool that looks like a box made of dashed lines to copy and paste the rest of the pattern in. Continue drawing in the pattern until there’s enough to easily cover the picture that should still be in the top corner of the square.
It should now look something like that. For the next step, open up Microsoft Word. When the program has started up, copy the image (the signature part, don’t bother copying the pattern).
To copy stuff out of paint, find the icon that looks like a box with a dashed outline. Select to tool and then click and drag to select the image. Then right click within the selection and select copy.
Then paste the picture into Word. Once the picture is in Word, you should see a picture toolbar appear. If it doesn’t come up instantly, simply right click the picture and select “Show Picture Toolbar”.
You should now have something like that on your screen. The buttons on the toolbar (randomly numbered for convenience) do the following things:
1. Insert Picture – Don’t bother clicking this button. You should already have your picture in Word and shouldn’t need to add another.
2. Color – There are four options under this. Automatic returns the picture to how it was when you pasted it into Word. Black and white only uses two colors. Grayscale puts the picture into shades of gray. Washout makes the picture lighter.
3+4. These two buttons adjust contrast.
5+6. These two buttons are the ones you should be using. They adjust brightness.
7-13. These buttons don’t matter.
14. This button returns the picture to its original form.
That’s basically what the buttons do. Mess around a little bit with the brightness a little bit. Try not to make it too huge of a difference between the first and second picture. Once you’ve changed the picture enough to make a difference, you need to get the picture back into Paint.
If you simply try to copy the picture back into Paint you’ll soon realize that it won’t work. Therefore you need to find the Print Screen button on your computer. For some computers you might have to hold Shift and hit the print screen key. After you find the button and press it, go back into Paint. Make the window about twice the size of whatever it was before. Be sure to have selected the tool that looks like a box with a dashed outline. Scroll down towards to the bottom of the window in Paint and right click. Then select paste. You should have a fairly large window appear. After you’ve pasted the picture, make sure you aren’t covering up the black square with the pattern or the base for the signature. If it is going to overlap, simply click and drag the pasted window down so that it doesn’t overlap.
Keep in mind that based on the version of Paint that’s on your computer, the window may or may not change size to fit large images.
You may wish to change the brightness of several images to overlap. Once you’ve pasted the images into paint, it should look something like this (after being cleaned up a little bit):
To make it simpler to work with, you may wish to change the background color around lighter images. Anyways, you should now have several versions of the picture and a block with a pattern on it. Now that it’s all set up, it becomes lots of fun to play around with.
Oh yeah, Word is no longer needed from here on.
Select the tool that looks like a box with a dashed outline again. If you have as much empty space as shown above, make the area to work with larger.
Once it’s at a better size, copy one of the signature versions into the empty space. Once the image is copied, you then copy the black square with the pattern. Of course, just putting the block on top of the image will do nothing. Therefore you must change a few options.
The options to be changed have been circled. In circle number 1 you should select the second icon. On the color pallet, circle number 2, right click on black. Changing this will make black become invisible when moving stuff about. Anyways, after changing these two options, copy and paste the pattern square onto the copied signature image.
It now looks fairly ridiculous, yet that’s how it should appear.
Next, take the other image. Copy it into the empty space. Then right click on yellow on the color toolbar. Then copy the image with yellow lines on it. Paste it on top of the second image.
It should now look like that. Yup, if you’ve managed to follow along with all this, the last picture should now have scanlines on it.
After that simply slide everything around the window so that the final product is the only thing left.
Voila. Yeah, looking back now you can tell that I definately should have added more of a contrast between the two pictures, yet because I noticed it too late I'm not going to attempt to fix it simply because it would confuse my little mind...
Of course, scanlines are a fairly basic pattern to make. You can also do the same sort of thing with a lot of different patterns.
Things like that can also be done, along with much more complex designs with several colors drawn to be changed into lighter and darker spots.
Anyways, with this sort of stuff and other minor changes you can easily get a signature to look pretty nice by using just Paint and Microsoft word.
And that’s an older version of what was just explained here. With more care taken and a little bit more color editing, you can make something simply wonderful.
And yes, the reasoning behind making this does have to do with the fact that everyone thinks Paint is worthless and that there’s was nothing else about paint on the Tutorial board... And chances are that no one will bother to read this anyways.
Lemme know if I messed anything up...