Open a photo on a phone and zoom in, and keep zooming. What do you start to see? Tiny coloured squares! Every digital picture is made of them. Today you become a digital artist and find out what those squares mean for your drawings.
In this post:
- Drawing programs such as Paint
- The main drawing tools
- Adding text and pictures
- Pixels, resolution and resizing
- Saving as JPEG or BMP (and why the sizes are so different)
- Three activities and a quiz
Drawing programs
A drawing (or painting) program lets you create pictures with the mouse, a touchpad or a stylus. Microsoft Paint comes with Windows. Free options include Tux Paint (made for young artists, with fun stamps) and KolourPaint. The tools in all of them are very similar.
Image source: File:KolourPaint 4.13 (en).png (Wikimedia Commons)
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The main tools
| Tool | What it does | Tip |
|---|---|---|
| ✏️ Pencil | Draws thin, sharp lines | Good for outlines and small details |
| 🖌️ Brushes | Paint with different brush styles and sizes | Change the size before you paint |
| 🪣 Fill with colour | Fills a closed area with colour, like the background or a wall of a house | If the outline has a gap, the colour leaks out! Undo with Ctrl + Z |
| 🔤 Text | Adds words: titles, labels or speech bubbles | Choose the font and size before you click away |
| 🧽 Eraser | Rubs out part of the picture | Make it smaller for careful work |
| 💧 Colour picker | Copies a colour from your picture so you can use it again | Great for matching colours exactly |
| ⬛ Shapes | Draws lines, rectangles, circles, stars and arrows, with an outline and a fill | Hold Shift while dragging for a perfect circle or square |
| ⬚ Select, Crop, Resize, Rotate | Choose part of the picture, cut off the edges, change the size or turn it | Look in the Image group |
Colours: Paint has Colour 1 (used when you click with the left mouse button) and Colour 2 (right button, also used as the background or fill colour). To colour the background, pick a colour and click the empty page with the Fill tool. Stamps: Tux Paint has ready-made stamps (animals, plants and more). In Paint you can add a picture by copying it and pasting it in (Ctrl + V), or by using Paste from, found under the Paste arrow in many versions.
Pixels and resolution
A pixel (short for picture element) is one tiny square of a single colour. Thousands or millions of pixels together make a picture. Resolution is how many pixels a picture has, written as width × height, for example 1920 × 1080. More pixels means more detail, but also a bigger file.
Image source: File:Fil-Pixel-example-wiki.png (Wikimedia Commons)
To change the size, use Resize (Ctrl + W in Paint). You can type a percentage or an exact number of pixels. Keep Maintain aspect ratio ticked so the picture does not get squashed. Making a small picture much bigger makes it look blocky (pixelated), because the computer has to stretch each pixel.
Saving: JPEG or BMP?
Use File → Save as and pick a type. Here are the main ones:
| Type | How it stores the picture | File size | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| BMP (bitmap) | Stores every single pixel exactly, with no squashing (no compression) | Very big | Simple use on Windows; you rarely need it today |
| JPEG (.jpg) | Squashes the file by throwing away tiny details you can hardly see | Small | Photos. Sharp edges and text may look slightly fuzzy |
| PNG | Squashes the file without losing any detail | Medium | Drawings, diagrams and screenshots with flat colours and text |
Watch: Paint in Windows 11
This short video tours the tools in the newest version of Paint. Older versions have the same tools on a Home tab. Which tools from our table can you spot?
Video: How to Use Microsoft Paint in Windows 11 – GeekChamp – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyIigbhjH2E
Activity: pixel painter
Try it: paint with pixels
Each square below is one pixel. Choose a colour and a tool, then click or drag to paint. Try the Fill tool on the background! Watch the real-size picture on the right: see how small 12 × 12 pixels really is?
Tool:
Colour:
Real size (12 × 12 pixels):
Four times bigger:
Activity: how big is a BMP?
Try it: file size calculator
Type the width and height of a picture in pixels to work out how big it would be as a BMP. Try 800 × 600, then try a phone photo of 4000 × 3000.
Width: pixels Height: pixels
Activity: which tool?
Try it: choose the tool
Choose the best tool for each job.
| Colour in the whole sky in one click | |
| Draw a perfect circle for the Sun | |
| Add the title “My Dream House” | |
| Rub out a wobbly line | |
| Use exactly the same green as the grass you already drew | |
| Cut off the empty space around your drawing | |
| Make the picture 50% smaller |
Group activity: model house or comic strip
In your group, draw either a model house or a three-box comic strip about something from our ICT lessons (for example, computer safety or caring for your computer). Use shapes, fill, the brush and at least one text label or speech bubble. Then:
- Save it as a JPEG.
- Save it again as a BMP, with the same name.
- Open the folder in File Explorer and switch to Details view to see the file sizes.
- Write down both sizes. Which is bigger? Why? Show your drawing to the class and explain which tools you used.
Self-check quiz
Click the best answer. You get feedback straight away; only your first click counts towards your score.
1. What is a pixel?
2. You click the Fill tool inside a circle, but the whole background turns blue. Why?
3. Which file type is usually biggest for the same picture?
4. Which type is best for a photo you want to email?
5. How do you draw a perfect circle with the Shapes tool?
6. What does resolution mean?
Related posts on islandclass.org
- Digital Drawing Lab Practical – 2026-05-14_11-17-59 – recording of our Form 1 lab
Next: The World Wide Web: URLs, Links and Browsers
Syllabus link: Forms 1–3 ICT curriculum, Module 3, Objective 3.7 – experiment with drawing tools.
Attributions to media used in this post:
- KolourPaint 4.13 (en).png – Fsandlinux – CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)
- Fil-Pixel-example-wiki.png – BlueEel (Danish Wikipedia) – CC BY-SA 3.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)
- Video: How to Use Microsoft Paint in Windows 11 – GeekChamp (YouTube)
Updates
2026/10/21
- Fixed the activity code so its buttons keep working.
© 2026 Vedesh Kungebeharry. All rights reserved.