Storyboard Artwork Project/Blank pages

What are "starters" in Tux Paint?

Tux Paint is a paint program. To make it fun and easy for kids to use, Tux Paint has pages which are ready to paint. These are in a folder called "starters". Put a PNG file into the starters folder and it becomes a page that kids can open and paint on. No matter what size these pages are, they will be expanded and shrunk proportionally to fit one dimension and the boarder pixels will be stretched to fill in the blank area.

These start pages can be very complex. They can have areas which are protected and areas which are not protected. That way they can have artwork which remains while the kids draw and they have other artwork that the kids erase as they draw. This is done with an alpha channel of the starter page. White means protection and blank means that the paint will stick to the canvas.

There are two parts to each picture. Notice how the white areas of the RGB image are masked by the mask to be transparent.

The RGB channels

Here are the color channels all together.

The mask channel

Here is what an alpha channel looks like. This is a gray image which is almost entirely black and white. See how Tux is protected by the mask.

Storyboarding Starters Page

Click on this image to see the full sized version.

Download it and put it in the starters folder for Tux Paint.

This is a scene that was creates with Tux Paint screen set at 600 by 800. This produces a painting which is 472 pixels tall.