Custom Msn Emoticons Tutorial

Creating a msn emotion or emoticon is easy if you have the right tools; those tools being a graphic program. Something fancy like photoshop or paint shop pro will make your job easier, but you could do it with the basics, such as Microsoft Paint.

Step 1:
Open up your program and make a new document. The size of an emoticon is 19x19 pixels. That gives you a total of 361 pixels to draw your emoticon. Not very much. If you are using Paint, resize the drawing area by dragging from the bottom right corner. You will see some numbers in the bottom right corner also that tell you how big your canvas is. Stop once you get to 19x19 and zoom in.

Step 2:
Decide what you are going to draw and how you are going to draw it. I can't really help you with this part. You need some basic artistic skill or talent. If you just want a smiley though, it's not too tough. You can use the circle tool to draw the head, then simply color in eyes and a mouth. Turn anti-aliasing on before drawing the circle, if you have that option. I have left it off in the example so I can show another way to color it after. This method isn't really needed for a smiley, but if you are making something else and didn't use a shape tool then it will come in handy.

Step 3:
Once you have the basic look for your emoticon you want to give it a little bit of depth and make it stand out. If your graphic program has one, choose the lighten/darken tool and set the brush size to 1 pixel. This is perfect for shading at this size. go around the edges of your emoticon and darken it up a bit to make it stand out from the background. Then continue to use the lighten/darken tool to do some shading. Make the outer edge darker, and gradually go lighter at you move inwards. You can see what I ended up with in the example to the left.

Step 4:
Next I go around the outer edge of the drawing into the white area and make it a little darker. The purpose of this is to soften up harsh jagged edges that exist. If you have used the circle tool with anti-aliasing on it would have done this for you automatically. However, since you're not always making a circle you're sometimes need to use this method. If you don't have the lighten/darken tool you'll need to choose other colors that are slightly lighter and darker than what you are working and use them for the shading. Because you need to change colors so often this method will take longer, but it will still work out the same, more or less.

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