Below you will find some tips as to how to use the Paint Toy interface to create masterful works of art here online at the Happy Ever After Club and display them in our Paint Toy Galleries

When you first arrive at the Paint Toy, once the javascript application has loaded, you will be presented with the Paint Toy toolbar and below that, a green screen with some text. If you cannot see this screen, then your browser needs to have javascript enabled, or further, the javascript library downloaded so that your browser can interact with the javascript that runs the Toy.

If you can see the green screen and the toolbar, then click on the green screen to activate your painting session - the painting "canvas" become white and you are ready to begin:

Immediately, you will be able to drag your mouse over the canvas and leave an impression - by default, the "freehand" is set to draw a line, at the thinnest width, and the colour will be black.

This is very effective for drawings, and may be all you desire to use, but if you wish to use other colours, brush stroke widths, shapes and the other painting options available, you can access these options via the toolbar.

(Note that you will need to save your finished artwork using the "Send" button, and also optionally give your work a title and an author name if you wish to submit it to our Paint Toy Galleries - if you don't do this then your work will be lost when you leave this page).

If you do wish to use different colours and shapes in your composition, then you can unlock these options using the toolbar. For example, you can change the width of your stroke by clicking on the stroke-width selector:

Creating a new stroke will show the changes to stroke width applied.

Note: you can "undo" your previous stroke by clicking on the "Undo" button at the top left of the toolbar, but this will only take you back one brushstroke, so please be mindful of this limitation and undo a "bad" or unwanted stroke result immediately it occurs or else you'll be stuck with it, or have to start again. However, many great creative moments are revealed through our "mistakes", so get into the flow and keep going.

Once you are more familiar with the toy you can "erase" bad strokes or sections of your image by painting over them in your canvas colour, or simply adding successibe layers of strokes to cover them - in this sense you can use the technique called "underpainting" to outline a composition roughly, and then create more defined layers of brushtrokes over the top, using the underpainting as a guide or a template . . .

To use other painting or drawing options, simply select a different setting from the drop down list as shown - again, by default is is set to "freehand":

Now we have selected the rectangle option, and dragging your mouse across the canvas will draw a rectangle, with the border being the colour of your stroke:

If you check the "Fill" box next to the drop down list, then your rectangle will be solid, based on your stroke colour:

Bored with black? You can change the colour of your stroke at any time before you make the stroke (or create the shape) simply by selecting a colour from the colour list.

There are two "levels" to the colour selection area on the toolbar, the master hue selectors that appear as harf-circles at the top of the colour box list, and the actual colour selectors displayed as squares below. By default, the colours displayed will be a range of useful ones. For greater control over the colours available for selection, clicking on the half-circles of colours at the top of the colour list selects a range of colours based on that master hue - this does not change the colour selection for your stroke. Below, we select the master hue of red:

The colour list will change to display a range of different colours based on the master hue (in this case red, running from red-black, to red-white).

To select any of these colours for your next stroke, simply click on any of the colour squares displayed based on your "master hue", and your stroke colour will be changed. The colour selection box at the top right of the toolbar will display your currently selected colour:

We still have the rectangle option selected, with "Fill" checked, so dragging our mouse across the canvas will draw a red filled rectangle - note that this will cover anything "painted" underneath previously:

Changing back to the "freehand" option, and selecting another colour, we can now draw/paint in an entirely different way again:

And so forth. Don't be afraid to experiment - your work won't be saved until you press the Send button at the bottom right of the toolbar. And if you do want to save your work, please give it a Title and an Author Name, even if it's not your "real" name:

The title and author text will be displayed in the Paint Toy Galleries along with your artwork, so how creative you want to be with names is also entirely up to you!