I'm gonna draw wario and show you want I do at every step.

Okay so, here we've got a fresh clean image of nothingness. It's one layer. This is going to be my sketch layer, called "Background" by default. The default background layer already has no alpha channel (which is used for transparency). this is good though, because when you erase you'll want to make it white (the secondary color) and not transparent.

SAVE ALL THE TIME. GIMP is retarded and crashes way too often, and saving can protect your rage meter from overflowing. First save it as an XCF anywhere (I keep a folder called xcf for unfinished things, with a folder in it for the completed things in xcf/finished for reference and just in case you want to change something). XCFs keep the layers separate.

I sketch everything in blue. It's easier to see what you've traced in black later if it isn't black--red is even better. but, if you don't have a graphics tablet and instead scan a drawing on paper, that's fine for a sketch as well.

When you've got your sketch make a new layer with an alpha channel (transparency). This is for lines. When you have multiple layers, you can navigate them with the PGUP and PGDN keys. Also, Home will take you to the top layer, and End will take you to the bottom one.

If the bendy lines in MS Paint are tricycles, paths are F-ZERO racers. To start, put your dots everywhere they'll form an angle. For very long curving lines, you'll get a feel for where to add more as you gain experience.

If you ever need another point to make the line more flexible, hold CTRL and click where you want it.

Now, each point has these two dotted lines capped with a square that dictate how they will bend. Obviously, you can move these around--it's more precise than grabbing the line and moving that, but different situations can call for either. If you hold Shift while pulling on one of these squares, the dot's other square will move in the same (but opposite) way--perfect for curves. You can also hold shift and pull a line to make the