Application Suite: Paint

Paint

Paint is a pixel-based picture editor. You can use it to 'paint' coloured images by applying colours to an area with a variety of brushes and painting tools.

The pictures produced by Paint are kept in the form of sprites. A sprite is a graphic shape made up of an arrangement of pixels (the smallest unit the screen uses in its current mode). Sprites are stored in sprite files which may contain more than one sprite. Sprites and sprite files use a standard format, so you can freely export images produced by Paint to other programs that use sprites, such as Draw and various RISC OS desktop publishing programs. You can also use Paint to edit bitmap files produced by many other programs.

The important difference between Paint and Draw is that unlike Draw, Paint knows nothing about 'objects' such as rectangles and circles; all it knows is the colour of each pixel. Although you can paint regular shapes, you cannot then select them in order to delete, move or resize them.

When you export a sprite from Paint into Draw this remains true. Regular shapes forming part of the sprite cannot be edited like Draw objects. The whole sprite becomes a single object in your Draw diagram, and can be moved or resized, but not otherwise edited.

The first part of this document is a tutorial section that introduces some of the more common features of Paint and shows how they can be used to create a simple sprite.

Later sections contain more detailed descriptions of all the features of Paint backed up with examples demonstrating how each feature can be used.

• Paint tutorial
  
  • Starting Paint
    
  • Creating a new sprite
    
  • Zooming in and out
    
  • Creating a blue background
    
  • Saving your work
    
  • Creating the landscape
    
  • Using the sheep and house sprites
    
  • Paint the clouds and the sun
    
• Reference section
  
  • Sprites
    
  • Paint windows
    
  • Basic techniques
    
  • To edit an existing sprite
    
  • To create a new sprite
    
  • The tool window
    
  • The main toolbar
    
  • Set/clear pixels
    
  • Use sprite as a brush
    
  • Parameters:
    
  • Replace colour
    
  • Move whole sprite
    
  • Copy block
    
  • Move block
    
  • Draw lines
    
  • Rectangle outline
    
  • Parallelogram outline
    
  • Circle outline
    
  • Ellipse outlines
    
  • Circle section outlines
    
  • Filled triangles
    
  • Filled rectangles
    
  • Filled parallelograms
    
  • Filled circles
    
  • Filled ellipses
    
  • Filled circle segments
    
  • Filled circle sectors
    
  • Insert text
    
  • Alpha channels
    
• Sprite windows and menus
  
  • File menu
    
  • Edit submenu
    
  • Colour menu.
    
  • Resize menu.
    
  • Transform menu.
    
  • Utilities menu.
    
• The Sprite file window
  
  • The Sprite file menu
    
• 32 thousand, 64 thousand and 16 million colour sprites
  
  • Colour models
    
• Importing foreign format files
  
  • Vector format images
    
• Configuring Paint
  
• Snapshot
  
• Principal changes in Paint between RISC OS 4.02 and RISC OS 6
  

This documentation is copyright 3QD Developments Ltd 2013 and may not be reproduced or published in any form without the copyright holder's permission. RISC OS is subject to continuous development and improvement as such all information is provided by 3QD Developments Ltd in good faith and is believed to be correct at the time of publication E&OE. 3QD Developments Ltd cannot accept any liability for any loss or damage arising from the use of any information provided as part of the RISC OS Documentation.

HTML document version r23142 (3rd November 2015)