Someone asked: “I'm new to Fatpaint. I want to create a book cover design with title etc. How do I go about this?”

1. Ok, first you need to set the canvas (page) size, and it depends on what kind of cover you want to create. For a magazine, I guess the size is A4. So, press the “Project” button, in the panel “Project Settings” you'll find the canvas size combo box, open it and select ”A4″. Actually, its eaiser if you just press “Project settings” on the Edit menu.

Attention: Working with A4 pages require a lot of memory, specially if you will be painting, cutting, I recommend at least 1 GB of graphic memory. Anyway, if images suddenly disapear, it's because you are running out of memory. You'll find info about memory consumption on the top right of the window.

2. Now you need to add your images and text to the page. There is a menu on top of the window called “Insert”, it will also show up when you press on an empty place on the page. Open the menu and choose “Image”. Now you'll be able to choose from where you want to get the image. When you are done, a new image object will be added to the page.

3. You'll probably need to adjust the image so it fits on the page. You can resize the image using the transformation tool (First tool icon), and perhaps you'll also need to cut/crop it.

4. To crop the image, press the “Raster Graphic” button and press the rectangle selection tool icon (7th icon). Before making the selection, you'll need to set the Scope to “Object Content”, it's a radio button just below the tool icons. Now, to select the area of the image you want to keep, press with the mouse on the page. A green box wil cover this area, press on it. A Selection menu will appear, and inside the “Crop” sub-menu, choose “Crop Object”. Now position/resize the image object on the page.

5. Now you need to add a title and other text, so we have to insert some text objects. Again, go to the “Insert” menu and choose “Text in 2D”. A new text object will be added to the page. Now you need to change the text, so press the “Move and transform content” tool (Second tool icon) and you will be able to write the text directly on the page

Attention: When pressing on the object itself a menu will show up with a lot of options, including changing the text. Watch out that if the text object is on top of an image, you need to press exactly on top of a text graphic pixel, otherwise the image on the background will be selected. To select objects, sometimes its easier to press the “Objects” button and press on the text object's thumbnail image, on the panel “Objects on the page”.

6. Now add more text and image objects if necessary. And you can also try to add some shadow effect to the text objects.

For more help using Fatpaint watch some of the tutorial videos here: http://www.fatpaint.com/en/tutorials

Fell free to post your questions here.