Wanna make your own pixel smilies! For cutenews, your forums, websites, etc..

What you need:

A graphics program that allows you to zoom in very closely to an image (paint is OK... but not the best...)

OPTIONAL...
a program that has a grid when you zoom in (most graphics programs have them)
I'll use a program called paint.NET


START

1. Copy this image and paste into a graphics program


2. Then ZOOM so you can see the image close up. For easy use make sure it is in some sort of "grid mode"
Example:



3. Draw your eyes, face, nose, ears, etc... Your *may* want to outline it like I did:


4. Save your image.

5. Upload it onto your site or photobucket or whatever
6. Put it on your forums, cutenews, website etc...

You're done! Now if you wanna make animated smilies read on or skip it if you know how to make animated stuff ans stuff.
ANIMATED SMILIES!
You'll need a animation program, such as unfreeze animation program. You need a unzipper program to download it. So if ya don't have one use
zip reader by PKWARE

1. First you need to make a frame. To make it look animated. For example, if you want to make a smily winking first you need to make a smiley not winking.
Ok well here's an example of a frame if you don't get it. It's kinda hard to explain...

First Frame:


Second Frame:


Put them together...

You get a smiley winking! I used two frames. The first frame (as seen above) was just smiling. The second frame smiley looked it is winked expect it is still; not moving. When I put them together it looked like the smiley was really winking as if you would do in real life. That's a animated .gif! Now you know what a frame is and stuff...now we're gonna make them!

1. Make your frames. Use can use mine for examples:

Frame 1:
Frame 2:

2. If you drew your smilies then save them with the extension .gif
If you you want to use my smilies then right click and select "save as"
3. Open up the animation program
4. DRAG your images into unfreeze of whatever you like to use.
5. Now you gotta decide on how fast you want to display your images (to make it animated)
Do not use put in the number 1. Ok what will happen is your frame(s) will "move" very fast!!! experiment with them until you find the one the makes it not too fast, or not to slow. Right click on your image (in your my documents floder) and select preview untill you got it the way you like it!

You're finished!!!! Here's how mine turned out:

Paint is probably one of the best pixel editing programs I've used. I'd rather use static smilies as they aren't as distracting anayways. The only issue I have with it is the fact that when you make images for it, it can only support one tone as a background color because of its lack of alpha transparency fo any format.

I personally think it's a waste to get a seperate animation program, especially for a smiley. GIMP can animate gifs using layers. Fireworks can do it too, but you can differentiate between two layers of layers AND frames.

This post has been edited by Tetraca: Sep 1 2007, 10:31 PM

photoshop is probably the best for this (and many other things), very cool tutorial and original ^^

Great tut! Original and nicely written. I might use this in the making of my forums.