Anti-Aliasing in Paint

For anyone who has used good old MS Paint for doing any kind of graphic work, you know that it can actually do quite a bit for a small, simple program....but that is also has it's limitations. One such limitation is the lack of anti-aliasing - meaning that whenever you draw any kind of curved line, it looks like shit. It's blocky and you can see individual pixels. There are some long, complicated ways of doing this - such as individually adding pixels and doing some shading to make the line look smoother. However, I have a way that is very quick and still works quite well.

The trick is to draw your original work as large as you can (as large as you feel comfortable drawing). You will come up with something that looks quite pixelated, like this example:



When you are done your drawing, go to 'Image' and then 'Stretch/Skew' from your menu bar (or just hit CTRL-W). Here there is a Stretch area with two boxes (Horizontal and Vertical) and a Skew area with the same. In the Stretch area (which is the top), type in a number smaller than 100 in both boxes (use the same number in both boxes). For example, try 35 in each. This will make the entire picture smaller, and you should notice that the pixel effect is minimized. The lines will look much smoother and pretty much like they are anti-aliased - like this:



You can play around with different sizes until you find settings that you are comfortable with. Using this technique, you can make your artwork look much more professional using a free and very simple to use program.