The most basic part of creating new cartoon dolls is: patience, patience, patience. It took me four, yes 4, years to perfect my dolls, and present them as they are today. And actually, creating new dolls doesn't take much, as they are relatively small in proportions to what artists make using other mediums. When I have a doll in mind, it usually takes me - about 20 minutes to complete. It just takes getting used to using the mouse, the computer, and whatever painting program(s) that you want to use.
          The other most basic part of making cartoon dolls is - you use the line tool, in whatever program you are using (to start off with at any rate). Yep thats right - your going to be drawing one PIXEL at a time. Beleive me, once you get the hand of drawing/shading one pixel at a time, you'll do great!!
          I know a few people now, who are so good at creating dolls, that they are able to use filters and gradient tools and all that, to create parts of their dolls. An excellant example of those would be of Xandorra's. She is so awesome at creating dolls, she's gone far beyond the 'palace' or 'classic' editing (as I like to call them) of mine. She uses a lot of the different functions of Paint Shop Pro to acheive the effects that she gets on her dolls, and boy - her dolls are AWESOME!

          If you are going to be making avs for The Palace, you will need to download the Palace Palette. Currently I only have access to the palette for Paint Shop Pro. You need to use the palace palette, because if you don't reduce the colors to 256 colors and apply the palette, the colors turn up more reddish in palace. Don't ask me why, its just the way they made it.

          Shading is what can make an av look so much better than other people's avs. You don't need a whole lot of shading on a doll, seeing as though they are relatively small compared to other pictures that people create, but it is something that defines a good av from a bad one. An av that was drawn well will look pretty crappy (pardon moi) without some sort of shading. Likewise, an av that was drawn poorly with nice shading isn't very pleasing to the eye either.
          I would suggest that before you just dive in and making your own avs, just edit already clothed avs/dolls, just to get the hang of shading. Or if you would like to edit your own, you can get naked dolls on this page.

Here are a few shortcuts in Paint Shop Pro (I will refer to this as PSP from now on):
          When you have clicked on the Paint Brush tool, you can hold down the ctrl button to get the color dropper tool, then just stop holding that down again to get back to the Paint Brush tool.
          When you want to erase something, you don't need to keep going to the erase button. Just use the ctrl button to get the color of the background that you are using, and then just use that to erase any mistakes.

	First, we have to get rid of the crappy skin coloring. No offence to whoever created the prep doll in the first place, then again, I'm sure that person isn't using Palace anymore, either :P. I'll be using a part of one of the dolls as an example for you all.
	In real life, things do not have a black outline, and I don't tend to use black outlines, either. You can if you want, just make sure you go from darkest to the lightest colors. I also fix the breasts, because they are too lop-sided for my tastes.

          And, thats the basics of shading! See, I told you it wasn't that hard. Just use the palette to find the colors, and go from the darkest to the lightest, and thats it. I beleive its called outward shading. You know, like in real life, the part closest to you is lighter, and the farther away something, get it gets darker. There are many different shades of people in the world, and you definately do not have to base your colors on the ones I choose to work with. Just play with the colors, and come up with the effects that you like for yourself.
          Here are a few palettes of just one color scheme, that you can use right away to get darkest to lightest colors, so you don't have to figure some out right away. I know its kind of annoying trying to figure out what colors look the best, so you can practice with these. Just save them to your own hard drive.