attitudechicka
I assume you mean this thread? I've been using that to learn to draw characters while simultaneously teaching myself to use GIMP - and I've only been doing both for about the past 10 days, so I don't completely know what I'm doing yet. Injokester's instructions for making GIFs are for Photoshop; I can't afford the full version and I already tried the trial version a while ago, so it won't let me run it now. (I even tried reinstalling.) I followed Injokester's instructions as closely as I could, but a few things were different in GIMP, and it might handle the edges differently.
I have noticed that GIFs come out more jagged than other formats, but that's what it needs to be for SC. Here's a comparison (PNG on the left, GIF on the right), as well as a fake iPod ad I made it into for fun:
I'm going to work on improving the pic (the one for attitudechicka, not the ad) over the holidays; I'm a college student going home tomorrow night if the weather's not too bad. Then I'll have access to a digital camera, so I'll pose for the pic and possibly redo it completely. There are a few things I don't like about this one. You might have noticed I already gave him a "haircut"; I thought his head looked a little big before. Also, when I traced the hands of the pic I used for reference, the fingers looked like talons at first, so I had to redo the hands from scratch and I'm still not completely happy with them, especially his left one (on our right) and I neglected to give him thumbs (partly 'cuz I couldn't figure out which side of the hand they went on at first). Hands are hard for me; I've tried redrawing them but haven't been able to do better, so I'll have to work with pics of my own hands to get it right.
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"Laughter is the language of the soul." - Pablo Neruda, as quoted by Lisa Simpson