Hello again, sorry it took so damn long, but I've been busy with Awakening, the tech demo, Verge 2's impending release and helping vecna squash all the bugs (he squashes and I bitch at him to squash them), SotS's battle system, VMG duties, and trying to write my first music disk. I lead a bloody active life.

First of all, let's quickly sum up a few problems that some people had with DPaint. The first thing to remember when using Deluxe Paint is that you have a choice of video modes. Choose 320x200x256 MCGA.

Second, the gradient box. It can be accessed by right-clicking on the little gradient in the tool bar. To choose a gradient, left click and hold. To manipulate the palette, do the same thing on that little checkerboard thing in the corner, right next to the gradient. Fully acquaint yourself with DPaint before doing any graphics work in it; it'll make it that much easier.

To use the Verge Palette, you have a few options. First, (and the one I do), you can open any file that uses the Verge Palette (say VORN.PCX) and then make a new file. Second, you can load it from a Custom Brush. Save a brush using the Verge Palette to the hard drive (Brush::Save), and then in a PCX file with your doodlings in it, load your custom brush again, and choose (Misc::Palette::From Brush). Tada.

Some of you may have heard me exclaim on IRC "A tree! A fucking tree!" Well, it's true. I finally got the hang of drawing trees. Once I get a basic idea of what to do, I leap with the idea and away I go, and I treated the entire thing with a certain desire to figure out a way to draw trees. Through treeal and error, and with a little treepidation (pardon these puns folks), I finally arrived at a few ways that an average artist, like you, can draw decent looking trees. These are NOT the best trees you'll ever see, but they are recognizeable as trees. They are NOT flat, and so beat Hahn-rips from HAHN01.VSP thumbs down. They have texture. They have leaves of sorts. They have trunks. They have some sense of depth. Generally, they're good things, and they're definately recognizeable as trees.

The first thing you need is a trunk line. Last tutorial, gawsh, when did I write that? I asked you to start drawing a tree trunk. Well, I have included the steps to making my stock tree trunk, and hopefully by now you will have drawn one. No, I hear you say? Draw one. Or just use mine for now.

The first thing you want to do is to take about 4 16x16 tiles of tree trunk, collect them with the brush features in DPaint, and plunk 'em down one on top of the other so you get a nice tall pole. Make a copy of that, put it somewhere else, and then the next thing you're gonna do is.... draw leaves on it!

Like I said, these are not gonna be the greatest trees, but they definately look like trees. Better trees have been done; the trees from Revelation are incredible, the trees from SotS are incredible, you won't have seen either of these two games's trees, but trust me... they're incredible, OK? Sorry to intimidate you there, but I need to plug a few games in my tutorials now and then.

The first thing you want to do is to draw your leaf brush. It should look roughly like a pine needle, in that it is always 1 pixel high. Anything else and you kinda get chunky. It should be shaded from dark, to light, to dark. It should look kind of like my little brush.

What you're gonna do is basically collect it, go to the brush tool, make sure that the brush tool (that's the paint brush in the UR corner of the tool box with the dots drawn on it) is set to the one where there are three dots (if it isn't, hold down on it until you get one that looks like it has 3 dots, this works with most tools BTW), and you're gonna sort of blap this leaf all over the tree. When blapping, you want to blap it so that it is set up roughly in the way that your tree is. The tree I was trying to draw is a sort of domesticish tree, and thus has a few jaggy in and out bits, but is basically rounded. So blap, but only do one side of the tree.

Next, hit the X button on your keyboard. This flips your brush horizantally so that it looks like you're looking at the other side of the tree. Now, blap on the other side of the tree. Voila, a tree!

Now, this takes some practice, and not every tree that you blap will turn out about right. I usually get a one out of five ratio. Your first few trees will probably look like something out of "Godzilla versus the Protoplasmic Blob with a Turd sticking out of its Bottom", complete with bad Japanese lip-synching. It's all a matter of practice, here are a few tips:

Once you have a fairly basic looking tree, you can actually add some shading to it (if you so desire). You do this the same way you'd normally shade a tile, only you want a really big vertical line brush. Shade in, then darken the corners. Voila! A quite respectable looking tree. The last thing you want to do is to touch up any holes that by any freak co-incidence didn't get hit with your leaves when you were blapping the leaves onto the trunk. I edited mine out in Maped 2.0, which has a beautiful tile editor which is perfect for this sort of thing. I kind of preferred my unshaded tree. The last thing that I did was to round off the trunk so it goes out like this /__\ - pardon that really bad piece of ASCII.

If you feel confortable making this sort of tree, you could try hand-drawing your own. I'm not particularily good at it myself, but what you want to do is to draw each leaf in with the curve tool in a dark outline, shade in by hand pixelling it, and then to get it to look slightly darker in the middle. You can't hand-apply these ones, you need to draw them on the tree itself. Good luck - if you learn anything more about this, let me have a look.