[Courses][gimp] Lesson 5: Basic Drawing Tools

[Julie Sloan]

On Friday 25 February 2005 07:48 pm, Akkana Peck wrote:
> For this lesson we'll take a step back from photographs, and
> learn how to use the gimp for drawing.
>


Sorry if this comes through twicet - first time isn't showing up an hour 
after I sent it...



Today 09:43:53 pm

gimp Lesson 5 - drawing tools

I'm no artist, but the straight line feature (shift-click) of the pencil 
tool is a lot of fun to play with.  So I built a desk, in a room, with a 
monitor on the desk, and a window.  I pasted a gif I had of a pile of 
smiley faces onto the monitor, along with a couple lines of text.  I used 
the pencil & shift click and bucket fill to make a small stack of paper, 
and found X's in the brushes dialogue to make some marks on the paper. 

Then I found a cat to lay on my stack of paper and used the freehand select 
tool (and lots of "undo") to remove the previous background from around the 
cat, and after lots of trial and error also removed the white background I 
was left with.  I used the "select contiguous regions" wand thingie and 
then select > invert while the white background was selected.

At this time I decided I had too many layers, and the three layers on my 
monitor could be one.  So, while making my cat invisible I merged the 
visible layers.

I have another cat who was on the refrigerator but I thought she would look 
good on the monitor, so I repeated the process I used with the other cat... 
but for some reason I can see stuff through her.  I don't know what I did 
different.  But on the layers, channels and paths dialogue is a "duplicate 
layer" button, which looks like two sheets of paper.  I duplicated the 
monitor cat a couple of times and that darkened her up.  

I wanted a window, but when I pasted it into my picture it showed up in 
front of the monitor.  so I clicked the eye to make it invisible and 
duplicated that part of the monitor it was covering up, and pasted that as 
a new layer.  I had to rearrange the layers so the window was right on top 
of the background, then the monitor on top of that, then the cat (and her 
duplicates) on the monitor.  I know I'm probably making this way too 
complicated.  I added a window frame & sill and hung a picture on the wall 
and used "pattern fill" on the bucket dialogue to veneer those and to add 
texture to the wall... scattered some crap around the desk and added drop 
shadows.  Taa daa.

http://www.bobsloansampler.com/gimp/lesson5.jpg

(before adding most of the layers)

http://www.bobsloansampler.com/gimp/lesson5a.jpg

(after adding them)

http://www.bobsloansampler.com/gimp/lesson5.xcf

(the xcf - well duh)

:)

Julie

no cats were harmed in making this image
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