julper

I love this method of shading!! It'll definitely save a lot of trouble from manually airbrushing things in. Word of advice to save at least some time and CPU processing for some people who run on older setups as I once did: You can also set the Morphology plugin to "Erode" about 10-20 times for the same effect as repeating AA's Assistant on a manual basis.

As part of my pre-existing indie endeavors, I've found lots of use for PDN in lettering and lineart alike. I have several rosters of designs made solo or under commission from others like Mattel or Seuss, and using other programs to trace these absurd resolution rasters into vector nodes and importing that to a working font file I've gotten quite addicted to just the act of manual lettering with this program. If it's acceptable to post tutorials involving other programs I'd be happy to share my process for stuff like creating fonts, animating cartoons and such all through heavily using Paint.net!

Random fact of the day: Skeletor of all characters is the singular breakout mascot for all things internally! There's a whole laundry list of industrial videos starring him explaining stuff like how to use ChatGPT. For that specific clip, I have my own personal collection of a lot of Filmation documents that have taught me better than post-secondary about how to art. For reasons I can't possibly fathom on account of my lacking seniority and political power, he's resonated above anyone who actually embodies Mattel's mission statement.

[Barb] Behold, another retroactively Matty creation that fell victm to the competition agreement: I can't post the actual video file here apparently, but this was part of the same ~15 minutes of animation I was coughing and chugging at for my own personal stuff until I sent it to the Dr. Seuss guy who ultimately picked me up for that stretch of time. One of these days I do plan on restarting these specific projects as I've discovered new (to me) methods of time-saving that still crutch heavily on use of Paint.NET for most of the process. (BTW, the attached image should serve as a clickable thumbnail...)

This looks like a logotype that was originally created in some sort of vector-based software, so unfortunately you can only get so close in PDN. I did my best to replicate this with many of the plugins you'll find here, though. Dependencies for pic related's workflow in approximate order used: Tube Oblique, Object Tools, Isolate Lineart, AA's Assistant

In the case of your document? Easiest and arguably best first step is your bog-standard high contrast. I ran your photo through an upscaler called Waifu2X and used the following presets on the default Brightness + Contrast: Assuming you have the original photo in better resolution than this outdated AI tool, your mileage may very well vary better than my rough demonstration. When dealing with these sorts of documents, I've noticed it's a very similar philosophy to physically Xeroxing the papers over and over again. The best part about PDN is that you can in fact use more precise tools like the aforementioned dust removers!

With raster-based programs like PDN this is really the only way to go. My personal workflow involves lots of cutting, pasting and merging layers on a per-glyph basis. Anything that demands to be shaped a certain way, you're best off setting your own guidelines with the line & shape tools. Doing stuff like this, it's generally a solid plan to work in as large of a base resolution as your machine can handle, that way you'll reduce AA artifacts and the overall generation loss that comes inherently with rotating rasters a bunch of times over. apy's "AA's Assistant" is an amazing plugin to cover your tracks in that department!

These predate my actual hire date by a bit but I figured it's worth sharing because at some point during onboarding I had to disclose stuff to corpo they thought would be of interest in accordance to their non-compete agreements. Robbie's retroactively official stock that they may use in future designs but they said I get to keep the template for emojis since I could prove I made a massive backlog of em before even applying (and before AI tools made it like insanely easier for anyone to prompt decent quality stuff!) - the other stickers I've made since are largely Mattel owned since it uses their characters on their dime and made for use with their promos you may or may not ever see anytime soon... The funny girl w/ pink hair was for a fan convention I was with for a couple years through covid I also had to part ways with largely because Matty hired me.

You did all of this in PDN?! Looks truly beautiful!!! How did you get such a painterly look with the shading? I don’t use a tablet myself so my workflow involves lots of stylistic blurs in no particular order

Hi everyone, not to toot my own horn too much but I am a self-trained artist who's been a die-hard proponent of Paint.NET since I was about 10 years old. Somehow I've gotten away with using the program throughout my career as an artist to date and have landed gigs at Dr. Seuss and currently Mattel using the same program, along with just about every single plugin I could force onto any given machine. What can I say? It just works! ITT I'll post some of the creations which I have clearance to publicize along with older posts I may have left on an older account from when I was about 18. I really love this program and am willing to jump through all sorts of barbed flaming hoops to keep using it because I do believe it is just as on-par with Adobe's suite or whatever they tell me to use. a taste of what's already been dripfed on my public portfolios: sorry if the previews are too large; I am in the process of porting crucial schtuff to a newer i9 machine. Like with paint.net, I've been using increasingly more potent builds on an older and older craptop until Matty picked me up tail end of 2023: some stuff's happening right now I can't delve into but I was able to FINALLY upgrade during it all...