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How Does This Durn Thing Work
FunDraw has three main purposes: to help you create art, to help you share the art you create, and to help you use the art you create in a variety of ways. So we've divided the Help area into 5 sections...
- Creating Art
How to use the Art Studio and turn your drawings into images you can download.
- Sharing Your Art
Ways to show off your art on FunDraw and other sites.
- Using Art
Okay, you've got this cool drawing, now what do you do with it?
- Misc
Inanities, legalities, and other stuff that doesn't fall into one of the previous four categories.
There are four ways to get drawing...
- Start With A Blank Slate: Just click the "draw" link up near the top of the page and you can start using the Art Studio (see the Art Studio cheat sheet) with a blank template.
- Start With A Piece Of Clip Art: Just browse around the clip art section. When you see a piece you like, click to its display page and click the "click here to play with this clip art" button. That will bring up the Art Studio (see the Art Studio cheat sheet) with that clip-art pre-loaded into your drawing.
- Do A Mash-Up On Another Drawing: If you're a registered user, you can just browse around gallery of user drawings. When you see one you like, click on it. If that artist is allowing mash-ups, you'll see a link that says "copy and play with this drawing" below the drawing. Clicking that link will bring up the Art Studio (see the Art Studio cheat sheet) with that drawing pre-loaded.
- Do A Mash-Up On Your Own Drawing: If you're a registered user and you've already created a drawing, you can browse around a gallery of your own drawings. Underneath them, you'll see links that say "Edit Drawing" and "Create Copy". Both links will bring up the Art Studio (see the Art Studio cheat sheet) with your drawing pre-loaded. The difference is that the "Edit Drawing" link replaces your previously saved drawing with your changed drawing, while the "Create Copy" link saves your edited drawing as a new drawing in your gallery.
TROUBLESHOOTING: The Art Studio is made with Flash. Most Macs and Windows PCs come with Flash pre-loaded and we've tested the Art Studio on Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox (1.5 and 2.0 on Mac and Windows), Safari (Mac), and Opera (Windows). We've tested this with versions of the Flash player from 7-9. So basically, 95% or so of the world should be able to use the Art Studio without downloading any extra software or having any problems. But if you have a problem, please contact the helpdesk.
Sharing Your Art
FunDraw.com offers a wide variety of ways to share your art with your friends and site visitors. The first thing you'll want to do when you're done drawing is give your drawing a title, a description, and some keywords.
Keywords will help people find your drawing. For example, our founder, Greg, used cat, kitten, funny, pathos, and escape for "Gone To My Happy Place". If you click on any of those words, you'll see all the drawings that use them. People can go through lists of the various keywords in use to help them find drawings that meet their interests or needs.Your next option is your artist bio. People will find links to it on your comments and your drawings, plus you can link to it from your personal web site, mail signature, MySpace page... wherever you can put a link. It shows off your drawings and other information you choose to share.
Additionally, when you're in the My Stuff area, you'll find some links below the top-of-page buttons. Click on the promote your drawings link. We'll give you a wide variety of cut and paste link and HTML you can put in your web pages to show off your drawings.And when your friends follow any of these links, they can download high-res copies of your drawings for free without even having to register.
First and most important... when you download a high-resolution version of your image, we provide you a high-quality JPEG at up to 2400x2400 pixels. This is the same photo format you'd get from a digital camera and big enough to print out photo quality at 8 inches by 8 inches at 300 DPI. If these terms are confusing, we have a page that explains graphics terms like DPI and pixels. It's basically equal to a 4.1 megapixel photo.
When you're done drawing and have clicked the "save and close" button in the Art Studio, or you're just browsing through our gallery of user drawings and have clicked over to see the drawing at a bigger size, we offer you EASY links to put that drawing on a wide variety of products. Just one click is all it takes to see it on a shirt or mug or whatever over at Zazzle.com, then another click adds it to your shopping cart if you want to buy it.
MiscGREG WOULD LIKE TO THANK: First, thanks to Todd Yard who let me use his PenPad flash component to get a jumpstart on developing the FunDraw.com Art Studio. Second, thanks to all the artists who have contributed art to the Open Clip Art Library, a collection of public domain artworks that really helped beef up our clipart collection. Also thanks to the folks who contributed free components to FlashKit and FlashComponents.net, and the operators of Sephiroth.it and Senocular.com for the great tutorials and programming examples.
Additional thanks go to the folks behind some of the more massive open source projects whose software help power FunDraw.com... The Apache Project, MySQL, PHP, and ImageMagick.