Draw An Anime Girl with MS Paint
Who Says You Can't Draw With A Mouse?
In the depths of Windows lies a little used drawing program called MS Paint. While there are many other advanced software you can download online, I like MS Paint for its simplicity. You can easily create a drawing using only your mouse and a couple of tools on MS Paint.
Here I'll show you the process behind drawing Kukuru Anrakutei from Joshiraku, MS Paint is good for drawing anime and cartoon characters, which rely on simple colors and lines. If you're looking to try out something new, why not give it a go? Who knows, you might be pleasantly surprised.
Note: I'm using MS Paint on Windows 7
The Line Tool
A drawing is essentially made up of lines. Hence, you will use the Line Tool a lot in your MS Paint drawings. You can change the line thickness according to your preferences. Making curved lines will be a bit tricky at first, but you'll get better with practice.
The Shape Tool
A drawing can also be divided into shapes. The Shape Tool makes it easy to produce basic shapes such as circles and rectangles. However, I tend to stick to the Line Tool as it gives me more control over my drawings.
The Select Tool
The Select Tool makes drawing on MS Paint even easier. If you're unhappy with the proportions, you can always select a specified part and resize or move it. This tool is especially useful when you're doing drawings with symmetry. Just selected the part you wish to mirror and flip it horizontally. That's 50% of your effort saved!
The Pencil and Eraser Tool
Since MS Paint is a raster program which utilizes pixels, your drawing will become pixelated once it is scaled. Thus, you can consider using the Pencil Tool to add pixels to a pixelated edge in a process called anti-aliasing, making your lines look smoother. The Pencil and Eraser Tool can also correct minor mistakes and fill in small gaps. Some artists use the Pencil Tool to do most of their drawings, though I can never accomplish that with my shaky hands.
The Color Picker and Bucket Tool
The Color Picker is based on where you click. In other words, if I click on a red square using the Color Picker, my primary color will be red. The Bucket Tool fills in any enclosed areas with a chosen color. The key word here is enclosed, otherwise your color will spill into other areas like a broken dam.
The Color Tool
MS Paint enables you to use 2 colors at the same time. For any tool, left click will pick Color 1, while right click will pick Color 2. With the Eraser Tool, by right clicking over a part that has Color 1, it'll be replaced with Color 2. It's quite hard to explain in words, so try it out!
Additional Tips
- Ctrl+Z is your best friend. Getting the perfect line takes a few (sometimes many) tries. Don't hesitate to use Ctrl+Z to undo any mistakes.
- Take some time to learn more about MS Paint. Take more time to experiment with the tools MS Paint has to offer. Even with the small array of tools, there's much potential in MS Paint to create some amazing drawings.
For this drawing, I used a reference image. The head is created using a circle and curved lines.
Starting on the eyes, hair and mouth.
Using the Select tool, I made the other eye without having to start from scratch.
Nearly there/
Finally, the line art is completed! Time for some colors.
I confess, I cheated a little here with the colors, using the Color Picker Tool to pick the colors directly from the reference image.
Done! Took me just over an hour.
