Remember all the trouble I was having with GIMP? A few late nights and plenty of stubbornness finally got me the results I wanted. My fabric from Spoonflower arrived yesterday and it is beautiful! The scale of the design is WAY bigger than what I had intended, but I'll probably make my apron out of it anyway. Should you find this design (sized much smaller - one square approx. 2") so utterly charming that you must must must have some for yourself...
You can buy some over at Spoonflower! (Designers get a 10% cut of the sale. Not exactly a get-rich-quick scheme, but kind of fun, anyway.) Isn't the Internet awesome?
I have one or two other things in the works, but you won't be seeing them until after Christmas. Until then, I'm sure you're dying to know what I spent the most time bashing my head against the metaphorical wall over in the early stages of getting acquainted with GIMP, right?
Background: I drew my design elements with pencil on paper and scanned them into my computer, then opened GIMP for the first time. (I've also never used a real image editor before.)
How do I get my scanned elements into GIMP??? You'd think this would be obvious, but File>Open isn't what you want, most likely. You want File>Open As Layers. Each little piece of your GIMP image is called a "layer" and you can search the web for plenty of info on that. Mostly, though, if you want to be able to move an element around your image, it needs to be in its own layer. You can hold down the Shift key to select several files and open them all at once, each in its own layer.
Why can't I see the layers I just created??? There are a bunch of possible reasons for this. The ones that have happened to me so far are:
- My new layer was HUGE relative to the window size. Try zooming out.
- My new layer was hidden under another layer (sometimes the background). Find your layers dialog box (you might need to open one via Windows>Dockable Dialogs>Layers) and click on the layers there watching to see if the one you want pops up in the image window as you click. Once you figure out what's going on, you might want to rename your layers in the layers dialog box so that you can find them more easily later (double click on the name, type a new name, and hit Enter).
- My new layer was outside of the "canvas" area (which is NOT necessarily the same as the default "background" layer that was created when you first opened your new blank image). Try Image>Fit Canvas to Layers. (Remember this one later, I found myself using it often throughout the design process. And it's always a good trick for when you've "lost" a layer.)
I want to color something but where do I pick the color? At the bottom of the Toolbox are two overlapping rectangles, they're probably black and white on your screen. The one on top is the "foreground" and the one in back represents the "background". You can click on either one to open a color picker and change the color. The paint tools all use the current "foreground" color and the eraser uses the "background" color. The tool saves a bunch of your previous color choices, so you can go back to them easily.
I've selected a paint tool and I keep trying to paint but nothing's happening! Took me a while to discover you can only act on a selected layer/region. Make sure the layer you're trying to paint on is selected (highlighted) in the Layers Dialog. If you're still having problems, you might have only a small portion of the layer selected. Try Select>All.
Every time I try to paint a line or use the free select tool my mouse jumps around and my line looks awful! Credit to Mr. Right for this brilliant solution: Zoom in. Way in. Like 400%. And try painting in small segments (lift up on the mouse button, then start again). Then you can Edit>Undo a mistake without losing 10 minutes of painstaking work.
I want the background (or other elements) to show through the blank space of my layer. Select the layer, right click on it in the Layers Dialog, choose "Add Alpha Channel". Now select the area you want to make transparent (probably Tools>Selection Tools>By Color Select and click on white space in your layer), then choose Edit>Clear.
I want to paint color inside a hand-drawn shape but GIMP keeps painting the whole layer!!! It took me stupidly long to read the tool tip for "Fuzzy Select", which says "Select a contiguous region on the basis of color". That's the one you want to use. Tools>Selection Tools>Fuzzy Select and click inside the space you want to color. Then use the Bucket Fill tool.
I want to change my scanned pencil lines to color but every time I try to Select By Color, only some of the pixels in the penciled area are selected. This is because your pencil lines are not one solid color, but a range of grey-scale pixels. Unable to figure out a fix, I laboriously painted over many many lines before this trick dawned on me: use Tools>Selection Tools>Select By Color to select the white background of your layer, then use Select>Invert to select everything that isn't white!
I want to rotate one of my layers, but every time I use the "Rotate" tool, my layer reverts back to it's old position as soon as I try to do something else. You have to actually click the "Rotate" button in the bottom right corner of the Rotate dialog box (you might have to hunt for this behind your main window) in order for your changes to take effect. Otherwise, you're only seeing a preview. Also, check your Layers Dialog Box, your result might show up at the top in italics as a "Floating Selection". You need to hit the anchor icon at the bottom of the Layers Dialog to "anchor the selection" before you can paint on it or anything like that. Don't ask me why.
I scaled one of my layers smaller and now it looks all pixelated. Yeah, turns out you have to change the resolution of the image before scaling things much smaller or you loose all detail. Edit>Undo! I found some tutorial online for the resolution change but now I've lost it. :(
Ok, those are the major ones. Remember you can always Edit>Undo! I'd be happy to answer any other questions now or later. Obviously, I have only the faintest clue what I'm doing, but I kind of think that's useful for other people just starting out because all the "beginner" tutorials I found didn't really start from the absolute basic point.
