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Let's Get Started!

The only tools you need are Jasc Paint Shop Pro and a desire to monkey around with vectors. You can download a free trial version of Paint Shop Pro by clicking here.

1. Open a new transparent image sized 400 x 400

Let's make sure we are working with the same page. Click on the "view" menu, click "toolbars" and make sure you have the following bars selected:

2. Create a new VECTOR layer and call it "Body".

3. With our "Preset Shapes" tool, with these settings, let's make a circle. (fig.1)Retain Style Unchecked, Antialias and Create as Vector CHECKED. Line width: 1, Line Style: #1 Solid. Stroke color: black (HTML code color #000000). Fill color : fudge brownie (HTML code color #86562E) (or Red:134, Green:86, Blue:46)

Let's go ahead and draw a nice circle for our monkey's body. Mine is about 175x175.

By clicking on layer palette window, then right click on our layer, we have a drop down menu. Let's click on "Align Object", then "Center in Canvas".

4. Now comes the fun part :) We are going to click on the Vector Object Selector button. It is right below our Preset Shapes Tool (shown at points "a" and "b",fig.2).

Next we'll click on our "Tool Options" window. We'll choose the first button, "Node Edit".

Our nice brown circle disappears and we see the outline of the path of our vector. If we hold down the Control Key and click near 1 o'clock, we can add a node. Let's do that, and add another near 11 o'clock.

Now let's click on those little square nodes of ours. If we pull 11 and 1 o'clock positioned noded a little toward the middle, and the top node up (play a little), then we can come up with a body shaped like an upside-down chunky lightbulb with the base removed.

We'll be keeping our shapes and layers separate, so later on, if we want to change parts of his body, we won't go bananas with the UNDO button:)

5.With the same settings we had in step 3, lets make another ellipse, for our monkey's belly. This time though, we'll use a creamy brown fill color (HTML#D5A985) (Red:213,Green:169,Blue133).

We now need to go to our Layer Palette Window, click on the tiny +plus sign next to our vector layer we created. This opens up the vector layer and shows the two separate vector shapes we made. Let's rename them to "Body", and "Belly". (fig4)

We should be saving our work often, so let's do that.

6.Let's make some arms. Piece of cake! All we have to do is make two small circles with our first colour. We'll keep his arms behind his body, so click in your layer view and rename those as Left Arm and Right Arm, and drag themr under the Body layer(fig.5).

Let's continue his legs and feet on page two