Editing Your Kitty Avatar

Ok, you've made your avatar and snipped it, all it needs is a little cleaning up.  For this I use Photoscape (because its easy and FREE).  You may have to download it, if so click here.  You can use other programs, too.

Click on Editor

To the left will be your files, find the one with your avatar, open it and click on your avatar.

At the bottom left will be a tab called "Tools", click on it.

A snip showing the files, the photos in the highlighted file and the editing box.

In the box click on "Clone Stamp".  Pick your brush size, I start with big and work my way down, if needed.

Click on an area you want to clone, usually close to the area you want to delete.  Anything in that circle will be replicated.  Move your mouse over to the area you want to remove and click.  Anything in the 2nd circle will be replaced by what's in the first circle.  Click away until everything is gone.

I'm making an avatar of Katie Isabella.

This is what I'm starting with, I'm ready to go with the biggest brush.

You probably will need to reset either the size or the angle.  I click on any of the other tools then reclick on the Clone Stamp.  If you don't like what you did, click on "Undo" for the last actions or "Undo All" to start all over.

Midway through deleting the "junk".

I can't show you what the clone stamp looks like, but its like a barbell.

When I move the mouse to go to the snipping tool, the clone stamp moves off Katie.

If you want to further customize your avatar, now is the time to do it.  You can use the Clone Stamp or the paint brush.  Click on the little color box to pick your color if you are painting.  I find it helps to enlarge the image when doing this kind of work.

You may have noticed it doesn't have Katie's famous half 'tache.

I picked something close when cartooning her and I'm going to create it.

I've enlarged her 200% and am using the big clone stamp brush.

Hey!  There's part of the clone stamp at the top!  How did I do that?

Further refinements using smaller brushes and a lot of changing the angle of the stamp.

There's the clone stamp on the left.

I'm working in really tight spaces, so the 2 circles are very close.

Now I'm going to use the paint brush to smooth out the rough edges.

The grey box to the right of the tool has instructions.

When you are done, click on the "Crop" tab next to the "Tool" tab. Draw a box around your avatar then click on "Crop".

You can play with the cropping.

I usually don't center, that's a no no in art school.

For this application I keep it close, but you could really have fun with the cropping.

Click on "Save".  Click on "Save As" when the new box pops up.  Name your file and pick your resolution.  Higher is better!

 The final Katie!

I hope she likes it.

I did a new Hannah.

I didn't really like the first one.

All the floofy body styles are squat.

I thought she looked like something out of the movie Gremlins.

By the way, see the GIF tab?  This is where you go to make those moving GIFs.  Its as easy as uploading 2 photos.  Look around the box where the Tools & Crop tabs are, as well as Photoscape.  You can do all kinds of neat stuff.  Add borders, do montages, add speech bubbles, make posters etc.

Are you having problems?  Let me know and I will try to help.  Most importantly, have fun!

UPDATE:  Go see what Sometimes, Cats Herd You did with their kitties!  They did a great job, and had a really creative solution for a one eyed  cat!