Various way to mimic painting with Gimp

Gimp is this open source application that is a pseudo Photoshop - and it has many features, from photo editing to image retouching, or even painting

Here are a few of the filters available that would turn a photo in a fake painting
Distort Filters : Value Propagate
Filters/Artistic/Oilify
Filters/GMIC/Artistic/Painting
Filters/GMIC/Artistic/Kuwahara
FX-Foundry/Artistic/Water Paint Effect

Here is the forum explaining a few tricks and some tutorials
http://www.flickr.com/groups/gimpusers/discuss/72157619108510544/

A proper tutorial to emulate smudged painting
http://www.gimpusers.com/tutorials/smudge-painting-technique

And last but not least the online website to test some filters
https://gmicol.greyc.fr/

Tips for Graphic design

Use good ingredients

High resolution Stock photo (e.g. iStockPhoto :  a compromise between cheap and good)

You can't go wrong with the following fonts:
- Georgia,
- Helvetica,
- Segoe UI,
- Avenir, Bembo,
- News Gothic.

Experiment with the grid system and see what works.
Don't be afraid to use big type and white space.

Draw

Get half a dozen different kinds of pencils from an art supply store and a few flip pads.
Draw simple shapes and look where their shadows fall—learn to see areas of light and dark.
Draw faces from photography books.
Draw things you like and care about.
Make line-only drawings.
Make shadow-only drawings.
Go see an Impressionist exhibit.
Expand your craft, open your mind to new styles and arts

Get inspired

Look at great design work that you someday aspire to do, and try to make an exact duplicate.
This is how great Renaissance painters learned their craft, and it is immensely beneficial.


Design skill takes years, but it will make your head a better place to live. It will open your eyes.

Tileable Patterns with GIMP

This post is for people trying to create tile able patterns using Gimp

Let's start with an openclipart symbol
http://openclipart.org/detail/1634/clothes-iron-by-johnny_automatic

Open this svg file in Gimp - resize it to 400x314 pixels
goto Layer / scale and put 200x157 pixels
duplicate this layer
On the 1st layer goto Transform / Flip Horizontal
On the 2nd layer - select layer to image size
then goto Transform /offset then click on the Offset by x/2, y/2 button and click on the Wrap Around radio button
The result should be :

Now select copy visible / and paste as pattern

you can now create a new image 1600x1200 pixels with a dark background
and fill that image with the above pattern

The result will look like this :

Oh ?! you wanted an "Iron man 3 wallpaper" ?!

More comics resources

Textures :
Plain-Textures.Free textures and backgroud pictures..
CGTextures

Learning Books (PDF)
Drawing Books - Open books for Creative Minds!
Save Loomis!

Inkscape tutorials and SVG download
2D Game Art for Programmers

Fonts
Font Squirrel 

Stock
Public domain and Free Stock photos


DeviantArt resources
youresources.deviantart.com

Tutorials
40-cartoon-character-illustration-tutorials

Comics Generator
Stripgenerator
Bitstrips
Pixton


Inspiration
Vintage Illustration Posters

Webcomics little helper

Here comes more helpful links and tips for (web)comic artists 

1. list of (free) programs

Inkscape - For your layout and illustration

Gimp - For sketching, inking, coloring, and adding text (Inkscape might be better for that task).

2. list of miscellaneous helpful links for the making 

Now if you don't have drawing skills you can always fall-back to use some nice comics stock resources free.

For Office comics
Check http://www.designcomics.org/ for usage details.

The whole source files (Characters, Background scenes, etc ...) is available for download in JPG (64MB) or Adobe illustrator format (207MB) at http://www.designcomics.org/source.html

For drawing references
Check this deviantart account, where a lot of renders are available


For caricatures and public domain pictures
check openclipart.org

3. Lettering

For a good selection of comics fonts
Check www.blambot.com (it's a reference)
The website even has some nice tips for letterer

4. Hosting 

Wordpress & Comicpress - Both for your basic site setup and webcomic layout.

(A nice alternative where everything is already setup is comicspace.com)

And finally Webcomic List - Great forum, get tips, help, or have people critique your work!

How to make cool T-Shirt

Making your own T-Shirt is a fun hobby - It requires about a good design and then you can go into a printing shop or post your creation on zazzle.com and then have a cool "unique" T-Shirt.

There are a number of rules to follow though
The design has to be contrasted, not too much colors and should be around 1800x2100 pixels in 150 dpi.

Having that in mind, you can go crazy.

Tilt-Shift made easy for Gimp

GIMP plug-in Toy 1.0: simple tilt-shift fakes from Alexandre Prokoudine on Vimeo.

Source : libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/toy-plug-in-for-gimp-simplifies-creating-tilt-shift-fakes

How to mimic a photo of a small model - while in fact it's a real photo of a normal sized house, people, boats etc ... The magic is in the focus blur and a feathered selection.

The plug-in (requires compilation) is available here at registry.gimp.org/node/25803

A gallery of Van Gogh's Paintings Get Tilt-Shifted (12 pics) - My Modern Metropolis

And a Photoshop tutorial to achieve the same effect www.tiltshiftphotography.net/photoshop-tutorial.php

Quick environment sketch with Gimp

Gimp 2.8 is about to be released soon (January 2012 ?!), and many people are waiting for the single window mode impatiently.

In the meantime, I've stumbled upon some nice Google+ posts involving some painting or photo-montage.

Painting environment composition is fun, and in a couple of hours, you can see result ... just experiment and try various brushes (the chaos and evolution set (by David Revoy) is recommended) ; one benefits of doing such exercise is learning to make good composition and harmonious sceneries, and how to set and use the light - because that's key.

These 2 videos might help :
YouTube - Quick environment sketch
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGYqZZwzp18 (from idrawgirls.com/tutorials/2011/10/20/how-to-paint-landscape-mountain-river/)

Picture credit : Phillip Koops / Peileppe

How to put Gif on fire (with Cammy and Morrigan)

From two previous articles: "Street Fighting with Gimp" and "cammy is back" ; Cammy White (as shadowloo "killer bee") was featured to show Gimp's ability to generate animated Gifs.

But to be honest, since there was no background, the gif files were a bit boring - now browsing through deviantart I found this gem - that script creates an animated fire effect ; just what we need to add some magic to a good fight.

And here's the result ... pure delight!

Credit : Sprites used are coming from the "Sprite Database" :

• Morrigan sprites sheet
• Cammy sprites sheet
• Fire Animated script made by Fence-post

Discovering GIMP FX Foundry

There are different profiles of Gimp users, from the digital artist geniuses spending hours on a canvas, the photograph expert looking for imperfections and tweaking the color's histogram, the retouching pro mixing various images into one epic composition, to the newbies that are just wondering how to do stuffs quickly and that looks good in matter of 5 mn.

For all these audience (but mostly the last), I think the GIMP FX Foundry is a pretty good collection of scripts - that will allow creation of fun effects and experiments (like the fx-foundry banner at the top of the article - which was made using the 'shrek-text' script).

How to install the FX-foundry scripts ? just download and extract the 100+ scripts in a temporary directory and move them into the gimp script folder - then launch gimp and voila!

Now be aware that some scripts require a preexisting image or photo some don't - you'll have to experiment a bit.

A nice way to see what each script is doing is to open the FX-Foundry menu and let the cursor hover on top of the script's name, that will show a bubble with some explanations.

Making a Calendar 2011 using Gimp or Photoshop

To create a calendar in Gimp it's really easy - there's a couple of scripts you can download here or there.

It's easy afterward to customized and get any look you want.

Below I opted for a "grunge" look, therefor I used the Downcome font then added some textures, some dirty spots and then applied a "Tear off" effect (that you can find here)

Here's below January 2011 which looks like the it has been printed on potatoe's sack.

There's a similar method for Photoshop you can find at : http://psd.tutsplus.com/tutorials/designing-tutorials/create-a-calendar-using-scripting-in-photoshop/

Originally found on 100 Best Photoshop Tutorials of All Time that Yield Professional Results

Cammy is back, fighting Morrigan Aensland

From a previous article: "Street Fighting with Gimp" ; Cammy White (as shadowloo "killer bee") was featured to show Gimp's ability to generate animated Gifs.

As an experiment, using the same gif and technique, the challenge was to check how hard it would be to replace Mr. Bison by Morrigan Aensland (Darkstalkers series) - and 1 hour later, here's the result :

Conclusion, that wasn't difficult ... just a matter of being patient and consistent in the process.

Credit : Sprites used are coming from the "Sprite Database"

• Morrigan
• Cammy

See all posts related to Cammy

Gimp in only 1 dock

As you may know by default GIMP has two default docks:

• The Toolbox with "The Brushes, Patterns and Gradients dock".
• The LayerBox with "The Layers, Channels and Paths dock".

Which can be a real pain on small display (like 1024x768) -  because basically one third of the display is gone for the docks.

But you can actually merge the 2 docks into the Toolbox, the lower part then contains the brushes, etc .. and the Layers - I've worked this way a couple of days and it's very convenient, (before that settings I had always issue with the LayerBox getting in the way).

Now I just press CTRL+L to access the Layers and CTRL+B to access the ToolBox.

The smaller theme I'm using is the official Small theme from the Gimp package but with this line uncommented (search for the keyword "smaller" in the gtkrc file

# Uncommenting this line allows to set a different (smaller) font for GIMP.
#font_name = "sans 8"
font_name = "DroidSans 8"

Also Here's the content of the gimprc file

# GIMP gimprc
#
# This is your personal gimprc file. Any variable defined in this file takes
# precedence over the value defined in the system-wide gimprc:
# /etc/gimp/2.0/gimprc
# Most values can be set within GIMP by changing some options in the
# Preferences dialog.
(default-image
(width 1024)
(height 768)
(unit pixels)
(xresolution 72.000000)
(yresolution 72.000000)
(resolution-unit inches)
(image-type rgb)
(fill-type background-fill)
(comment "Created with GIMP"))
(monitor-xresolution 86.000000)
(monitor-yresolution 86.000000)
(save-tool-options yes)
(save-accels no)
(toolbox-wilber no)
(theme "Smaller")
(help-browser web-browser)
(toolbox-window-hint normal)
(dock-window-hint normal)
# end of gimprc

By adding "(toolbox-wilber no)" you can save a little extra space at the top of the Toolbox by removing the probing eyes.

Below are extracts from the Gimp's online manual

Dialogs and Docking: "GIMP has great flexibility for arranging dialog windows on your screen. Instead of placing each dialog in its own window, you can group dialogs using docks. A 'dock' is a container window that can hold a collection of persistent dialogs, such as the Tool Options dialog, Brushes dialog, Palette dialog, etc. Docks cannot, however, hold non-persistent dialogs such as the Preferences dialog or an Image window.

5 links to download Gimp Brushes

As previously mentioned the new major release of Gimp  (2.8) will come with new resources (organized by tags) - the current kit is pretty old (see picture)

But where can Gimp users find already cool brushes :

First, I recommend to download GPS (gimp-paint-studio) - GPS is a collection of brushes and accompanying tool presets made by Ramón Miranda.
GPS is very complete and comes with documentations and tutorial - the focus is on traditional artists (brushes are called "2B Pencils", "Anatomy Pencil", "Oil small" etc ...)

Secondly the brush kit from davidrevoy.com called "Chaos and Evolutions" worth a shot.

Otherwise you can find a compilation from various source at www.techzilo.com/gimp-brushes/
or  brushes.deviantart.com

Also good to know "Photoshop brushes" work in GIMP (2.4 and above) ; which means you can also add .abr files into your /brushes folder and they'll work too.


And in last resort you can always make your own brushes.

Gimp Developers talk to Gimp artists and ask for help

Every Gimp user may have complaints at least dozen times about the default resources in GIMP (you know the square empty brushes, the pepper brush etc ...) and even if many contributions have been made (i.e : Gimp Paint Studio being the most famous) ; it feels like adding new settings and options onto an already uncontrolled mess.

Because to be honest, when you have worked a bit with Gimp you end up using only your favorites brushes (usually collected on various random website) and depending on your style (e.g : grunge, traditional oil painting, gothic, techno etc ...) ; that means every time you want  to select a brush, palette, script ... you have to go into this dreadful mess of presets and options ...

Well, it's about to change with the introduction of resource tagging in Gimp 2.8 - because the plan is to drastically get rid of the vintage brushes and depending on the artists feedback and contributions to add new useful (and well organized with tags) set of brushes.

How can an "enlightened" Gimp user help : Simply by posting his contribution to the Bug 589371 - Improve default set of resources.


Now hurry because Gimp 2.8 is expected to be released at the end of 2010.
And if you want your best brushes, palettes, scripts, presets etc ... to be there you better get crackin'.

Read full article at the gimpusers.com GIMP artists! Your help is needed!

Gimp: How to make a "Russian Propaganda Posters"

Nice tutorial, to get a "Russian Propaganda Poster" effect on your illustrations or photos with the Gimp (2.6) - only a dozen of steps to follow :

1. Open photo (easy)
2. duplicate layer your illustration (to keep an original)
3. duplicate layer for each item you want to colorize
4. convert to grey (color/desaturate)
5. Use Color/Curves to get more contrast (need a bit of practice)
6. convert to 3 colors (Posterize)
7. Open custom palette with 4 colors (white, black, orange and red)
8. select color grey - drag and drop orange
9. select color black - drag and drop red
10. same process with the different layers you created on step 3 ; so goto 4
11. add some texts and export as png

See full episode here

Meet the GIMP[Episode 053]: In the USSR the Posters are watching YOU!

For some real posters samples, here's a website where you can find lots of propaganda poster (beware the website looks is a bit ... how can I say that ... well, you'll see by yourself)

http://posters.nce.buttobi.net/

Applying the same process here's another attempt - that has nothing to do with "Russian Propaganda Posters" - it's just a figure of style.

Rock'n'Roll trip with Super5 - grande finale !

My Transcript :

• Now, you see why the ring buoys are vital in a car !
• Darn, look we were going to Leningrad
• Man !
• Well done Kurt! without you there would have been no gig tonight
• but hey ! ... What did you shout like this ?
• but Kurt wasn't there anymore ...
• Lots of people pretend to see him when it smells like teen spirit ...
  but on this road man, go figure ?!
• I think ... he said "grep me" or somethin'
• Well, sorry guys, but I still don't get it, why is the song named "a virus in the computer" ?

Here's the original post Blog d'un robot: Rock Robot

NB: the whole comics is online at https://lerockavanttout.org/rock-bandes-dessinees/a-virus-in-the-computer/

Super5 : Inside joke

Rock'n'Roll trip with Super5 - page 3

My Transcript :

• KURT ?
• What the funk ? We thought you were dead
• Alone thinking suicide
• (are you) writing a new song ?
• Care to join us, we'll have a gig at the Pribinaček festival
• Concert ... festival ... thousand of junkies
• Do you want a ring buoy ? .. darn (we're out of stock)
• Never mind

Here's the original post Blog d'un robot: Rock Robot

NB: the whole comics is online at https://lerockavanttout.org/rock-bandes-dessinees/a-virus-in-the-computer/

Rock'n'Roll trip with Super5 - page 2

Continuing my little work of translation ... here comes page 2

My Transcript :

• we just had received our ring buoys, so we were rushing to the festival
• the ring buoy are very comfy
• we should have filled them with helium
• ... like badass Led Zeppelin
• Aha, Ah, Ah
• Bloddy Hell, Watch this !

Here's the original post Blog d'un robot: Rock Robot

NB: the whole comics is online at https://lerockavanttout.org/rock-bandes-dessinees/a-virus-in-the-computer/