Help Please With 50s/60s Retro Vector Cartoon Style

[c128dude]

I have Paint Shop Pro Photo X3 and Paint Shop Pro 9. My tablet quit working and I am drawing in a specific cartoon style. It is a retro style where the the cartoon drawings look like vectors and they are solid colors and no outline. When drawing people they are usually side views but both legs visible and the heads are often facing the opposite direction than the feet. Men are mostly wearing hats and have exaggerated noses. Women are wearing short dresses. The women's legs are what I'm having trouble with. They are shaped like macaroni but narrower at the bottom than top. If I use the pen tool I can easily curve the legs but I can't narrow the width at the bottom of the leg near the shoe. If I use a rectangle I choose Convert to Path and I can narrow the bottom of the leg nicely but I cannot curve the leg like a noodle like I want. I did try the Warp Mesh mode with mixed results but also I like to use transparent background with antialiased vector but the Warp Mesh looks terrible when I add a background color to my drawing. There are a lot of white pixels mixed into the antialiasing. Any suggestions? Buying a new tablet now is not an option and buy illustrator is not an option.

Thank you.

[LeviFiction]

Unless I'm missing something what you want is quite basic for vectors. You don't need a professional grade tool like Illustrator to do it. Although if you wanted a dedicated vector program Inkscape or Xara might do. Inkscape is free and Xara is $89 or so.

I wish I had an example image I could work off of because I don't think I can explain it properly.

So vectors haven't changed that much, if at all, since version 10 of PSP. I have a basic tutorial on the Pen tool, it spans 3 videos - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsFOxoXe70w

Using the information in those tutorials I created these. I doubt they're exactly what you're looking to do but the thin cylinder one was made using a rectangle, and the more curvy one was done using the pen tool.

legs.png (8.35 KiB) Viewed 2810 times

[c128dude]

That's perfect. You got what I was going for exactly. I was worried I couldn't explain it well. Thank you. I will keep practicing using PSP X3 and may try Inkscape as well.

[c128dude]

See attached. Mine are not as good as yours, but after watching all 3 YouTube segments I get it. The trick was to start with a rectangle and to convert to path and end with the Pen tool. Well that worked for me.

legs.png (11.35 KiB) Viewed 2765 times

[LeviFiction]

My legs just used big curves. Nothing subtle about them. xD

Glad to hear you're working it out.