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Suggestions for a wannabe painter?

S

sctybdy

Charter Member
Hi all and happy New Year!!!
So I've been thinking about getting into the whole repainting game, but dont know where to start. I see abacus has 'Fspainter 2.0' out. I also have noticed a lot of painters using 'Photoshop' by Adobe. Adobe Photoshop costs an Arm and a Leg, but the pictures on Abacus website seem amaturish and I'm not too impressed by what I've seen on their website.
Any Suggestions on this matter would sure be appreciated. I really want to start playing with this Mega box of crayons.
:icon29::ernae:
 
You really need a 'good' painting application to be able to produce good skins as there are some tools/features that are not available in the lower cost tools. You also need to have a good grasp on how to use the painting application. You can learn to use the painting tool and learn how to paint skins at the same time but expect your learning curve to be correspondingly longer.

Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro are by far the two most popular painting tools used by repainters but remember that you DO NOT need to have the latest and greatest versions of either to be able to paint excellent skins. For instance, Photoshop 7 is more than capable of doing the job and copies of older versions can be bought for a song on places like Ebay.

There is also a freeware painting tool known as 'The Gimp' which is almost as powerful (same say equally so) but I found it difficult to use as I have used Photoshop since v1.0.

Once you have your paint tool of choice you will need some tutorials and there are multitudes of tutorial sites on the web for all the major painting tools. You will also need tutorials on how to paint skins and without doubt the following site is the best one on the internet.....

http://www.simmerspaintshop.com/

Follow the tutorials on that site and you will be painting skins in short order.
 
Thanks Tako,
I'll take a look at The Gimp and other paint apps.
Its pretty nice to have a place where we can come to get the BEST advice in the flightsim world.:ernae:
 
sctybdy said:
Hi all and happy New Year!!!
So I've been thinking about getting into the whole repainting game, but dont know where to start. I see abacus has 'Fspainter 2.0' out. I also have noticed a lot of painters using 'Photoshop' by Adobe. Adobe Photoshop costs an Arm and a Leg, but the pictures on Abacus website seem amaturish and I'm not too impressed by what I've seen on their website.
Any Suggestions on this matter would sure be appreciated. I really want to start playing with this Mega box of crayons.
:icon29::ernae:
Click to expand...

You are correct, Photoshop is costly. But Photoshop Elements and Paint-Shop Pro are not. If you want a good low-cost graphics editer, you'll not go wrong with either. PS Elements will do all you'll ever need in a repaint.

If you would like to try some freeware that will also work, people here have used GIMP with great success: http://www.gimp.org/.

Paint.NET is another freeware program that will allow layers and has many tools similar to PS and PSP: http://www.getpaint.net/.

Good old MS Paint has its limitations, but it too can be used to do simple repaints.

Caz
 
I use Corel Draw suite (I started with version 3 or 4 and kept upgrading every vew years) - but that makes me a very odd one out in the FS repainting club. I have tried the GIMP and found that it apparently has all the functions one needs, but at my time in life after 15 years or more with Corel...

Thing is, I bought it for the same reason as was suggested for photoshop - older versions get sold cheaply, so I just stay two versions behind the current one.
 
Hi
If your looking for freeware and want to paint for fsx, then paint.net and gimp are the only choices(as far as I know :) ) as they have plugins that will allow you to do bumpmaps. Gimps not the easiest interface to work with but there are plenty of tuts around. Paint net a lot easier to use but a little light on the functions out of the box,there are hundreds of user made plugins that fill some of those gaps but you will have to do a lot of trial and error to find out which one's works well for you
Wozza
 
It also helps to keep in mind that it is NOT the tool that creates art, it is the skills of the artist!
 
Some good advices here.

I'm happy with my PaintShopProX (and DXTBMP of course!)
Never felt the need for FSRepaint.


n4gix said:
... it is NOT the tool that creates art, it is the skills of the artist!
Click to expand...
True.
But even the best fiddler can't make nice noises with a crappy violin he just draw out of the garbage bucket... :icon_lol:

One suggestion from my side:
Try to start with an aircraft with a decent paint kit!
You'll get better results right from the start, won't get too dissappointed in the beginning and start your learning curve from a higher level on!

Cheers,
Markus.
 
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