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Preparing

First, you need to craft some things.

Canvases: every canvas gives you one block of painting, so one is enough for a small painting, and 16 will be enough for the largest possible single painting (4×4). Typically, I suggest going with 4 — it is enough for a 2×2 painting that can fit on the easel.

You can combine those canvases on a special Artist Table, which you will need to craft too. We will cover the canvas combination in the next step.

Now we need something to paint with — paints and palette. Palettes are required to save the colors you are working with, and they are not infinite. They will not break, but you will need to recharge them eventually to continue painting. There are also alternative recipes, which you can find on the recipes page.

Finally, you would need an easel. You can find its recipe above. The easel needs some space, so don't place it right near the wall!

Combining and splitting canvases

To prepare a canvas which is larger than 1 block, place the newly crafted Artist Table and right-click it to open combine & split interface:

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1) Canvas combination grid

Place your canvases here in order to merge them together.

2) Preview

Shows how combined canvas will look like.

3) Result slot

When you're happy with the result, grab your merged canvas from there.

4) Change mode

Press to switch to split mode. Combination grid should be empty.

Preparing Workplace

To start drawing, you would need to prepare our painting workshop. Place the artist table, the easel, put canvas on the easel and get palette in your hotbar.

With canvas in hand, right-click on easel to mount it.

Our workshop should look like this:

With (or without, if it's already in place) palette in hand, right-click on the easel to start drawing.

Painting

Time to create your first masterpiece! Let me introduce how drawing interface works. Here's the reference:

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1) Tools

Available tools: pixel pencil, brush, color picker, bucket tool and hand. Every tool has own purpose, we will describe them below.

2) Canvas area

Place where magic happens. When hovering over the canvas area with a drawing tool, a drawing cursor should appear, showing the area affected by the tool. You can reposition canvas with space (hand tool) and mouse wheel (zoom tool)

3) History & Scale

History and zoom tools. Press undo to revert the last action, and redo to get it back. Hotkeys are working. History is shared between players! Press plus to increase canvas scale and minus to decrease it.

4) Palette

Palette shows color saved in the palette which is placed in the slot (5).

5) Palette slot

Palette shows color saved in the palette which is placed in the slot (5). You can save up to 16 colors in one palette.

6) Canvas slot

Current canvas placed on this easel. You can also get it by shift+click on Easel, but alternatively, you can use this slot.

7) Tabs

Depending on the tool you're using, you'll see different tabs here. When you click any tab, the contents of (8) area will change. Last tab is always inventory. Not all tools have parameters. We'll cover different tools and parameters below.

8) Current tab

Current tab. You can select color from here, set up your tool opacity, size, and other options. When inventory selected, it shows your character's inventory.

Tools and Settings

Color

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Inside the color tab, you will see three sliders (1,2,3) and an input field (4).

1) Hue (H) slider. By holding mouse over that slider you can change the actual base color in currently selected palette slot.

2) Saturation (S) slider. It affects the contrast of current color. On minimum value, it turns color to grayscale palette.

And (3) is brightness (B) slider. On lowest value this will turn your color to black.

4) Input field can be used to import color from somewhere else. It accepts hexadecimal value of RGB color, sometimes it's called HTML notation. It looks like this: #FFDAE9. You can freely paste to that field or enter manually. When pasting, it's not needed to clean up the field, color will be replaced automatically for convenience.

Pencil & Brush parameters

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Configurations for Pencil and Brush tools are similar, so we'll cover both in one paragraph.

1) Blending type. It defines, in which color space and which algorithm will be used to blend colors when blending is applicable (brush tool, not full intensity pencil). First here is RYB blending, which tries to imitate how real paints work in a very simplistic manner. It can be weird, but it makes nicer colors. Second is RGB blending, which is very familiar for digital artists (you may prefer that). Last is natural blending, which uses real data kindly provided by researcher Scott Allen Burns. It's not yet implemented in fact, but should give the best result in future.

2) Dithering type. When enabled, every N pixel will be skipped, to give painting classic pixel-art dithering effect.

3) Intensity. It defines, how much the pixel color under the brush will be affected. Blending is made by selected blending type. Lower values will barely affect color (useful for shades and lights), maximum value will just replace underlying pixel with another color.

4) Size. Bigger size will affect more pixels. For brush, it's smoothly increased, but for pencil there are thresholds, pencil has only limited set of shape-sizes.

Inventory

Your character's inventory. You can use it to quickly change palettes and canvases.

Signing paintings

When you are finished with your artwork, it's time to put your author signature. You will not be able to edit the painting after signing, so make sure it's good! Right-click with canvas in hand at empty space to open preview & signing interface:

This is the preview and sign screen for your painting. On the bottom left hand side you will see the name for painting (default is Unnamed) and your nickname. On the right hand-side there's Sign button. Press it when you are happy with your painting and given it a name.

You do not need to clear default painting name. Just start typing your name.

Creating a frame

After signing and naming your painting, it's time to place it somewhere in your fancy house finally! To achieve that, we would need to create a special frame and put the painting into this frame, then place it on the wall, by right-clicking wall with framed painting in hand. Make sure there's enough space on the wall for it!

Congratulations! You should finally see something like that, when your hard work finally pays off. Congratulations!

Copying a painting

If you would like to duplicate your painting, you would need to combine the signed painting without a frame with the blank canvas of the same size and a palette with sufficient paints. You will have a copy in a result slot, and the painting will be kept in the original slot, as well as the palette, with reduced paints amount. Like books, paintings have three generations: original, copy and copy of copy.

Sharing paintings

You can share your painting with the world using this site, and download paintings from other artists by using Zetter Gallery add-on.

Zetter Gallery is independent mod, which requires Zetter to work. It is downloaded separately, so players who prefer not to have online features can keep basic version of the mod.