Thursday, January 14, 2010

Doodle Gimping


There's a new creativity warm-up exercise called The Panel Doodle at my other blog, Compost And Creativity. Here's another way I use material from my warm-ups as part of my other sampling activities.

For several years, I have occasionally used a version of The Gimp for photo imaging, and it's time for me to get comfortable with more features of the program. GIMP is a freely distributed program for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. You can read about it here. For a free download, go here. There are tutorials here.

Or you can just scan an image and start playing with it, with no particular outcome in mind. Let me repeat that, with no particular outcome in mind. I like to use doodles for this kind of experimentation because there's no emotional attachment. You can try any hare-brained idea without feeling like you're "messing up" if it turns out bizarre or ugly.

So here's how I Gimped my panel doodle warm-up. I added color, applied a film strip effect and a perspective effect to a selection, layered the selection over the original image, and put both of those layers on a black background.

I could take this image over to Spoonflower, play with repeats, and order fabric to be printed and delivered right to my home. But that must wait for another day.

For now, I'll just ask. Would you like to Gimp along with me next month while I play more with this digital imaging program? Hit the comment button below to tell me what you want to find here at Two Red Threads.

7 comments:

  1. Yes! I downloaded Gimp a couple of months ago and would love to play with it in a more creative way.

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  2. I'd like to play along.
    I've been using Gimp in little bits for maybe 12 years, but feel I've only scratched the surface.
    Another good resource is http://meetthegimp.org/tables-of-content/ - a video podcast with gimp tutorials. I watched a lot of them early last year, but ran out of time plus found it not easy to use when I wanted to refer back to something. So this week I bought a book "Beginning gimp: from novice to professional" by Akkana Peck and have started reading through.

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  3. Great! We'll make February Gimp month, then. If there are any particular things you want to focus on, note them here for now while I get my ducks in a row.

    Thanks for the link, Judy. Let us know what you think of the book.

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  4. Hi Donna, I've been following along with your blogs just to keep the juices flowing. I think I'll download the gimp and play along also if that's ok.

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  5. The more the merrier, Judy. Glad to have you gimp with us.

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  6. I would like to say yes to GIMP, but every time I look at it I get frustrated. I've used other design programs (I've been using a program called Canvas), but this one frustrates me. So, the answer is a maybe.

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  7. Maybe is fine, Sherri. We'll be glad to have you check in to see what's happening and jump in if you like.

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