Lesson 3: Cut-and-Paste and Saving
Sprite comics are best known for how they're built: an exhausting amount of cut-and-paste. And one problem will emerge: white blocks around your sprites and/or sections of sprites being invisible after pasting. I had this problem with Link in the beginning. His sheet had a back-ground of the lighter of the two default greens in the Paint color palette and some areas of his pants were white. On top of that, all my other sprite sheets were backed with the default white. I came up with one solution: I flooded the entire compilation of sprites in the file with the green, and then filled in any remaining unwanted white spots. Now I can just set the background color (right-click the color in the palette rather than left-click) in both Paint windows to green and cut-paste without worry. Most other sheets I left with the white background because none of them run the danger of invisible spots.
There's still a problem with this, however: what if you want to use the color you choose as background in a set? Answer: double-click the offending color to open the Color screen, click on the Define Custom Colors button to open up the color editing section, then merely adjust the Lum by 1 or slide the arrow on the vertical color bar just a tad, then click Add to Custom Colors, then click Ok. The new color will then replace the color you double-clicked in the palette and will not count as the background color, but still look the same as the background. I used this to prevent clouds from becoming transparent. The Color screen also has more standard color options than are shown in the palette and, of course, you can make your own custom colors. Be aware that all custom colors will disappear when you exit Paint and they only hold for the Paint window you built them in.
When saving, you have some options in what kind of file to save your comic as, depending on how old your Windows OS is. The one I use, Windows XP, lets you save the images as one of four bitmaps with differing color ranges: Monochrome, 16 color, 256 color, and 24-bit, as well as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and GIF. Avoid the bitmaps as they are huge and take a long time to load on the net, since it has to go through and deal with each pixel individually. I attempted to use JPEG at first, but when I did, it created auras of color distortion around all the characters. PNG stayed smooth when I changed the file from .bmp to .png, I haven't tried TIFF because I don't know if the net supports it and I like PNG. Changing from PNG to GIF causes a file-wide distortion of color, so pick one or the other or do the change, then re-copy everything from the PNG to the GIF and re-save. It'll stay smooth the second time.