My shot at a GIMP tutorial..

I use GIMP cause I'm too cheap to buy Photo Shop or Paintshop Pro.. I've noticed that people hardly make any tutorials for GIMP, so I decided to help remedy that.. Let me know what you guys think.. I also think that you can roughly use this for PS and PSP..

The tutorial has a lot of pictures, which might be too big.. I'm not quite sure.. Anyhoo, I made this icon:



I started with this screencap of Spike (from BtVS) in an episode called "Spiral".. I think he looks hilarious in this shot..

This is my desktop at the moment..



First things first.. I crop the image using the cropping tool (which is right above the "U" in Untitled.. I forgot to highlight it.. Heh..)



I tried this a couple of times and wound up really close on Spike's face.. I also keep my crop a perfect square, since I have to resize it soon..



Here I scale down the image, and make sure I keep the aspect ratio.. Not necessary to click, since you can manually change both values, but it's more of a just in case deal.. (You'll have to change the view to 100% now so you can see what you're doing..)



Now, there are some ways to improve your icon.. You can either go to Layer > Colors > and use these options.. You can also try Layer > Colors > Auto > Normalize.. For this particular icon, when I tried the normalize option, it didn't change my icon.. I then tried fixing it with layers..



First I duplicate the background layer.. Then after playing around quite a bit (which you should do right now), I wound up having 4 layers.. The original background, a copy of it set to Soft Light, and 2 more copies on top of that set to Screen..



BTW, at some point, probably earlier than this, you should save your work (as XCF at this point).. And REPEATEDLY after this.. Trust me.. GIMP is a bitch.. It freezes at the worst times imaginable.. I lost a complete icon I made of Conan O'Brien, because I never saved it.. I have to keep chanting to myself "It's free, it's free!!".. Heh.. It also helps if you don't click on that black box that pops up.. The program keeps working, but it will shut down if you close the box.. Grr.. Stupid box..

Anyhoo, back to the icon making.. I felt like playing with gradients, so I made a new layer and chose a lime green color.. I chose for the green to fade into transparent, rather than white, left to right.. And set the layer to Soft Light..



I made another new layer, and chose a bright blue this time.. This time I made the gradient reversed, from right to left.. I also set this layer to Soft Light..



In a new layer, I put some text that said "dork".. I chose a font called Smudger LET (which I think I downloaded from DaFont..) in a dark blue and set to 32 px..



I then rotated the layer counter clockwise so that it was vertical and set the layer to Hard Light.. I repeated this procedure on a new text layer with a "*" on it.. I found that I could place the asterisk better if it was on it's own layer..

On yet another layer, I placed a border.. This border was made by hecatesknickers.. I had to make it into a GIMP brush though.. I find that after you clear the white, if you invert the selection, and then go to Image > Mode > Grayscale, that the brushes will save easier..



I picked the same dark blue that I used for the font, and set the layer to Darken Only..

Now I save my final version of the icon.. I can save it as a gif, jpg or png.. I'm partial to PNG just cause I find that it saves less fuzzy than JPEG.. I never did try that compression trick though..



Here's another look at the finished product..



Ta dah!! We're done.. Let me know what you think of it.. Maybe less pictures next time? Or smaller ones? Questions, comments, complaints..