Five Pointed Star Using Windings
Other Pictures, Problems and Procedures
In Paint for Windows 7, there's a five pointed star in the Shapes gallery. The tutorial for Paint in Windows 7 is here.
A quick and easy five pointed star
For a plain colored star, this method is fine. However, if you're planning on an outlined star and want it to be dead accurate, you might consider the much more complicated method of drawing a regular five pointed star.
If you would like to work in Paint while you follow these directions, do remember that you can resize your browserA Browser is the program you use to visit sites on the Internet. Internet Explorer (IE) may be the browser that you use, but there are many others, such as Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, K-Meleon and Blackbird.
You can have as many browsers as you like, and run more than one at the same time. window. If the window is maximised—taking up the whole screen—you'll first need to click the restore button (the middle one of these) 
, then just hover your cursor over a side edge of the browser window until a double-headed arrow appears, press your left mouse button and drag left or right until the window is a suitable size.
You can then grab the browser window by the title bar and drag it to the position that you want it in. You can do this with almost any window on your computer.
Popup help from CSSplay where you'll find other amazing demos
Start by opening Paint
Open workspace.bmp or workspace.gif. If you haven't made that yet, please read Your workspace file. The infomation there is helpful—although it might be overkill for something as quick and easy as this. You only need to set up the workspace once and you're all set.
Type the Wingding symbol
To get this:
Click the text button and draw a big text area.The Text Toolbar will appear.
Use the drop-down font list to change the font to Wingdings.
Highlight the size number and type in a big number.
(The picture shows the size of the symbol when I typed 140.)
Click into your text area, hold down the Alt key and type 0171 on the number pad (not the numbers along the top row of your keyboard).
Release the Alt key and the star will appear.
If nothing happens—if the star does not appear—tap the Num Lock key and try again.
Copy and recolour
Click on the Rectangular Selection tool and choose the option for Transparent pasting. Make sure that your background color is white.
Draw a marquee around your star and press the Ctrl key as you begin to drag. Drop a copy, press Ctrl again and repeat until you have as many stars as you want.
Now click on the Flood Fill tool and choose a colour from the palette. Click on one of the stars, change colours and click on another, and so on.
An outlined star
If you want your star to have an outline, zoom in as far as you can.
It's much easier to work here with strongly contrasting colours, so temporarily Flood Fill your star with one colour that's easy to see. Choose a very different colour for your outline. In neither case choose yellow. It's hard to work with.
Click on the Line tool and choose a line thickness. (If you're using Vista, you can choose the line thickness as an option for the Polygon tool.)
Click on the Polygon tool.
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Put your cursor on the very top pixel of the star and drag down to the first corner.
Click on the next point of the star and the line will follow.
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Click the next corner, then the next point and so on, until you get to the last corner.
At the last corner, double click.
The last two lines are drawn in automatically and your outline is complete.
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Copy and change the colors
Click on the Rectangular Selection tool and choose the option for Transparent pasting. Make sure that your background color is white.
Draw a marquee around your star and press the Ctrl key as you begin to drag. Drop a copy, press Ctrl again and repeat until you have as many stars as you want.
Now click on the Flood Fill tool and choose a colour from the palette. Click on one of the stars, change colours and click on another, and so on.
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Save your outlined stars
Click on the Rectangular Selection tool.
If necessary, draw a marquee around each star and make them into a neat line of group. Then draw a marquee right around the line or group.
Go to Edit on the Menu Bar and choose Copy To.
Type outlined_stars or something of the sort. Make sure that the filetype—Save as type—is 256 color bmp (98 and XP) or gif (Vista) and click Save.
You'll be returned to your Paint window.
Using your stars
When you have a picture open in Paint and want to add one of the stars you made and saved, first make sure that your Rectangular Selection tool is set for Transparent pasting, and that your background color is white.
Go to the Edit menu and click Paste From.
Find the star picture that you want and click on it.
Click Open.
You'll be returned to your Paint window with the chosen picture in the top left corner.
Put your cursor inside the marquee—the dashed rectangle surrounding the small picture— and drag it into the poition you want it in.
If you want to change the color/s of the star, do this before you save the whole picture.
If the main picture is a jpg (like a photo) try to leave pasting the star until almost the last save, as each jpg save blurs edges a little, and many saves make this effect more obvious.
Other Pictures, Problems and Procedures
Questions or comments? I'd love to hear from you, especially if you have helpful suggestions regarding any one of this set of pages. They were begun in response to some reader questions and I've arrived at solutions through trial and error. As I went over the exercises and tried to follow my own instructions, I several times saw a quicker or easier way to do something and it's likely that readers may still see some better solutions.
My email address is here.
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