New to the forum and Paint.NET, anodized paintball stuff!!!

[RDKamikaze]

Howdy everyone! This is my first post here, so I thought I would start off with a HUGE thank you to everyone who has posted and submitted comments along the lines of hue/color changing and everything along those lines!

Now, here are a few pictures that I have played with today on Paint.NET. First off, I have ZERO Paint.NET experience, so I think I did rather well with everyone's help (from my reading) for a young first timer! And if anyone would like to give me more tips and tricks to fine-tune everything, you would be my hero!!! :D

I play paintball very often and have been in the sport for years. What got me started on this new paint.NET craze was that I wanted to see what my gun would look like with the new anodizing job (like a paint job for aluminum), but nobody was replying on the PS request thread. Thus being said, I ventured out to try it on my own, so that way I could change anything as I go if I thought something looked out of place or would look better to my appeal. Bear in mind, pink is the new hot thing in paintball, so don't judge me because I think it's cool

First, we have me changing colors of my paintball mask with the conditional hue/saturation add-on. This made it a super fast and quick change, thanks to the makers!

Before:

After:

Now, we move on to the gun itself! This is my halfblock pump cocker, I don't expect anyone to know what that means lol! Here we go

Before (download big one HERE):

Attempt #1 (before reading, only watched 1 youtube vid):

Attempt #2 (after reading and learning how to make everything so much better!!):

As you can all tell, I'm still not the best (plus I only used about 10 minutes painting and layering on attempt #2) but if you all have tips to help it look cleaner and better, please let me know! Or even some add-ons that anyone knows about for making this process any easier (I know it can't be ridiculously easy as accents must be picked out from same base color, black) that would be fantastic!! Or, if you want to try it yourself and post your results, have fun with doing whatever you want in any colors you desire!

Thanks for looking, I just wanted to say thanks and show what I'm working on for some input to make it better! You all rock, this forum is amazing, and the creators of Paint.NET are epic!! :D

[Mendo]

hey man not too bad but the barrel is a little sketchy might i ask how you re cloured?

[RDKamikaze]

Thanks! I think I did pretty well for a first timer lol! What I did was I outlined the parts I wanted to anodize and then made a new layer and painted them with a pinkish purple color. Then I changed it to (I think it was?) blend option with the first layer and changed the fullness and stuff like that until it matched fairly to what I wanted.

Do you have a better tip or anything? I know it's possible to be done better, but it really gave me a good idea of what my gun will look like when I send her in

[Mendo]

just a few tips; try to get your straight edges a little straighter maybe draw a line with one of the selection tools and make it so you can't colour past that line, also try different methods of re colouring because depending on what outcome your looking for a different approach may turn out better, from what i can see you've done extremely well for your first atttempts.

another way to change colours is to select the bit you want coloured and press ctrl+shift+G this will make it black and white(easier to re-colour ) try using colour filter, you may have to download the dll. but just search colour filter and you should find it, there will be a setting for colour and a setting to preserve highlights you may want to play around with the highlights setting as you can achieve a better result of what your gun may look like.

oh, and also try recolouring all sors of things for practise because re colouring is not an easy task as i know very well, but different items require different tequniches to achieve different results, hope i helped if not PM me for a more detailed way of reclouring.

regards,

menDo

[RDKamikaze]

Hey wow, thanks for that tip! I wasn't thinking that there would be more than a couple different ways to color and I'll for sure play around with it and other things some more to see what I can achieve

[Mendo]

glad i could help, if you want help with anything else PM me and if i can't help i'll refer you to someone who can