Animated Mario

To make this I used my first Mario picture and decided to animate it. To make this I just took out Mario and the goomba from the background and duplicated it a bunch of times, it turned put using 54 layers. To do Mario I created three images of him, one standing, one in walking motion, and one in jumping motion. I just copied and pasted these on different layers at increments to get him walking and jumping. For the goomba I just flipped the image since he only changes which leg is up, to make him squashed I just scaled the image down. This actually didn't take me too long, the hardest part was figuring out how to do it, and what to use.

Mona Lisa Becomes Pope

Using Wikipedia's random article button, came upon a picture of some pope. Then I just scaled down a pictur of the Mona Lisa and put her face in.

Quick Edit/ Venom taking over Halo

This was just a quick edit off a Halo Pic. What I did was selective filling and painting with the paintbrush. If you get a picture off the internet it will already have set areas. The splatter effect was made by filling in certain areas of the grass and painting the ones that were to big or small.

Why you should wrestle

To make this I took a picture off Google and pasted my face onto it. I had to fill in the background because this guy's head was bigger that mine. To make my face this type of red I used the Hue Saturation editor under the Colors tab.

Jack the Revolutionary

Yes, I happen to have some pictures of the dog on my hard drive at work...so here's another where I tried to create the iconic Che Guevara type image that you see on t-shirts and posters using Jack, the Springer instead of Che. For this one I played with a few editing tools: 1. mask 2. colorize 3. threshold and 4. layer types (in this case multiply).

The mask tool in particular is really handy for creating an area to fill in with the bucket tool. You can check out a great tutorial for this method here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yupmgRJqwTc

Using the Curves Tool to Make Colors Stand Out

I played with the Curves tool on this photo of my dog waiting for a tennis ball. It is one of the more useful tools for basic photo editing. Curves works for changing the color, brightness, contrast or transparency of the active layer or a selection. To use it go to Tools>color tools>curves (or right click on the picture and follow the same path). Not sure how well you can pick up the difference between the two photos on the blog, but basically what I did was create an "s" curve and made the picture pop a little bit. The blue a little bluer, green a little greener, black a little blacker etc.

Broken Screen

I made this by using a screen shot and a picture of broken glass. On the broken glass layer i used the "select by color" to delete all the blue of the unbroken pieces of glass.

Tree

To do this I created layers of green and used a large smudge brush to create different patches of green. Then I used a very small smudge brush set at 90% smudge rate to create the grass. To make the tree I downloaded (with Marty's help) a tree brush. Then I used a small galaxy brush to make the leaves.

Super-Special-Awesome Pic #2!

Yep! This one was somewhat decent. I used a lot of pencil for this one, and the airbrush tool as well. I figured out about the straight line option doing this. YAY! But, anyways, the fuzzy brush also played a great part in this one as well. (I go for things that are slightly abnormal but still slightly believable.) The smudge tool also helped with the aura thing. It came out better than I expected! ^_^

Tranquil Reflections

This is just a different version of Ocean at Sunset

Ocean at Sunset

I started out with two fields of blue and orange. I added brown and red lines to the sky, then blurred it. I added white, purple and dark blue lines to the ocean. To get that wavy look, I blurred in waves.

I use a small paintbrush to to make the stars outline. I followed through with the blur tool to give it a faded effect. For the moon I used the ellipse tool. I filled in the circle with a soft white color. Then I used the paintbrush again for the black shadow. A good way to get the fade effect is with the fuzzy tool add-on. For the spots on the lighted side I used the spray-can tool set on a dark gray color. Just lightly spray in spots to blend in.

Desert Cliff

I did this by taking a photo off Google and selectively smudging, then I blurred the edges of the smudges to give it a more blended look. I had to smudge horizontally to show the different layers of rock that are common in the desert.

Desert Sunset

An interpretation of high desert blending into agricultural fields, which can be pretty dramatic out West.

Not quite a finished work, but my eyes are starting to cross a little. Just playing with shades of the sames colors. Really only a few. Three shades of orange-red, three shades of brown-black and three shades of green. Using the smudge tool quite a bit along with the calligraphy tool varying the size of each tool. I gained some efficiency by painting all of the dark sides of the mountain and then all the light sides, and then blended each side all in one step. The mts. are a little more neon right now than I would like, probably will go back and add some darker, more earthy shades later.

I also downloaded and installed 1100 new brushes to Gimp (there are lots of brushes available online). The instructions for downloading and installing brushes are on bapstmoodle. Lots of options.