For some stupid reason whenever I start painting with pencil tool it simply doesn't act as expected at all. For example, I want to create a darkened shading effect on a base of one colour (skin colour in this case). Instead it draws a line with pale shade! Even worse, I cannot seem to draw other shades on other colours, like white - it just doesn't respond (although I can undo it, which still does nothing)! The fill tool still works properly.
Please help. everything worked fine with other projects, but on this picture it is just infuriating.
Your picture is likely color-indexed (loaded a GIF?). In that mode, the color of a pixels is one of the 256 colors (max) in the color map, so Gimp coerces your color to the closest fit in the color map. Another restriction is that transparency is binary instead of being progressive.
You can convert the image to full RGB (
Image>Mode>RGB) but if you export as GIF the restrictions will hit you again and will be applied on the fly on the saved picture so you may be even more disappointed by the result.Or make sure that the Pencil tool is in
Normalmode.