Artwork
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To read about how to make pictures for websites, Click here.
This last picture was made with Corel Photo Paint 6. It contains several objects that are layered. The chinstrap head in the upper left was set to be 50% opaque. The red eye is a cut out, 100 opaque, and pasted on top. The turquoise color is a background color that the chinstrap head and landscape had set as their transparent color. With Corel you can "lasso" irregularly-shaped objects like penguins and cut and paste them.
Corel Photo Paint is expensive and most people don't have it. But you probably do have the software to make pictures like the other ones above. This is what I did to make them.
1) I took pictures. Any camera will do.
2) Scanned the picture into my PC, using an HP 6300C flatbed scanner set to the lower resolution of 75dpi because many browsers and software packages expand pictures to twice normal size if you use a higher resolution such as 200dpi.
3) Used MS Paint to select the part of the picture I wanted to work with and copied it to another file. In some cases I combined cutout parts of more than one picture.
4) Used MS Paint to color over the part of the picture I didn't want. I colored it turquoise.
5) Next I needed to save the picture as a .GIF file. But because MS Paint produces strange colors when it writes .GIFs (it has pre-set colors in its .GIF pallette), I changed at this point to using MS Picture It Express, and opened and saved the file as a .GIF from there. Picture It Express selects the colors it will use in making a .GIF by scanning your picture. Notice the picture of the two gentoos in fight stance. That was saved as a .GIF in MS Paint. You have to use .GIF format to make transparent colors. The picture of the chick yawning and stretching is .JPG format, so it's not transparent. .JPG's are slightly distorted looking too.
6) Finally I Used MS FrontPage to import the picture where I wanted it on the web page. Selecting it, the picture toolbar offers a tool that will make any single color you point at go transparent. I pointed at the turquoise. The dark blue background on the page "shows through" where the turquoise was.
