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376 CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING There are also plug-ins you can download, such as Resynthesizer, and other techniques such as a high-pass filter and the Clone tool, which can go beyond Make Seamless to help make your patterns tileable. Running Make Seamless sounds easy, and it is. But if you make patterns often, you ll probably find that it s not always that simple. Regular patterns, such as bricks, may end up warped or blurred in unnatural-looking ways. Even fairly random patterns like waves don t always work. For instance, my ocean sample was a small area selected out of a larger image. But I get a much worse result if I move the selection just slightly over, to a place where there s a dark spot visible beneath the surface (Figure 9-49). Figure 9-49. Another selection from the same image: ocean waves with a visible dark spot Even after Make Seamless, using this image as a pattern shows a tiled effect (Figure 9-50). Figure 9-50. This pattern doesn t look realistic when it is tiled. The key to choosing a good pattern is finding one without much change from one edge to the other. If it s brighter in one corner, if there s a spot in the middle, if there s an obvious shape inside . . . it will be obvious where one tile ends and the next begins. Sometimes this is acceptable (and even some of the GIMP s built-in patterns show obviously tiled edges), but most of the time you won t want that.
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CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING 375 After making brushes, I m sure you can guess how to save a pattern. Go to the brushes folder in your GIMP profile, and save it as type GIMP pattern (a .pat extension). When it prompts you for a description, type something appropriate (I used Ocean waves ). Then open the Patterns dialog and click the Refresh button in the lower-right. Easy, right? Well, of course there s a catch. When you use that pattern, you ll almost certainly see a tiling effect, as in Figure 9-47. Figure 9-47. You can see seams at the edges of the tiles. What went wrong? There s a sharp boundary where the bottom edge of one copy of the pattern doesn t match the top edge of the next copy (and similarly with the left and right edges, though the effect is less obvious). The eye is very good at picking out boundaries. That won t do! Fortunately, the GIMP has a filter to help with creating patterns which can be found at Filters . Map . Make Seamless. After running Make Seamless on the waves pattern, saving it, and reloading it in the Patterns dialog, now Fill with Pattern gives Figure 9-48. Figure 9-48. After running Make Seamless, you can t see the boundaries any more.
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374 CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING Figure 9-45. Drawing with the animated grass brush Importing Animated Brushes The GIMP can also import animated brushes from certain other programs. Paintshop Pro calls them tubes and uses the .tub extension. Convert them to GIMP animated brushes by opening the .tub file as an image, and then saving as GIH. For other programs, you may be able to find plug-ins or external programs to convert a brush to GIMP s GIH format. Note You ll sometimes see the term image hose to refer to animated brushes, especially in the Paintshop Pro world. The idea is that the brush is a hose that sprays out a stream of constantly changing images. Pipes (as in GIMP s dialog) and tubes are other ways of referring to animated brushes. Making Patterns You ve probably used some of the GIMP s built-in patterns by now. But you can get a pattern from anywhere. For instance, what if you want a pattern made from ocean waves (Figure 9-46)? Figure 9-46. Ocean waves to make into a pattern
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CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING 373 Figure 9-44. Options when saving an animated brush Spacing is the distance between consecutive brush marks, just as it was with simple brushes. It s specified as a percentage of the brush size. You ll have to experiment with this setting to find the right one for your brush. For grass, 8 or 10 works fairly well. Description is simply a text description you can give to your brush. Number of cells is the number of layers in your image. GIMP should initialize this for you. The rest of the options Cell size, Display as, Dimension, and Ranks control how the frames of the animated brush are chosen from the image, and in what order. For a simple animated brush like this, leave Dimension at 1 and set the first Ranks column to the number of cells (6, in this case). Note For more complicated brushes, you can choose to divide each layer into a grid, and then use each grid cell as a frame in the brush. Dimension and the other Ranks fields tell GIMP how the grid is set up and in what order to choose the frames. These make brush design more complicated; you re probably best off ignoring them until you get very comfortable with animated brush design. You can use them for effects like changing orientation according to the direction you re drawing. The menu next to the Ranks entry controls the order in which cells are chosen. Random picks a random layer each time; Incremental uses the layers in order; angular and velocity let you create more advanced effects, such as changing the brush image according to the direction or speed the mouse is moving. The other options, pressure, xtilt, and ytilt use those values from a drawing tablet if you have one. If you don t, you re better off sticking to Random or Incremental. Figure 9-45 shows the effect of drawing with the grass brush.
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372 CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING Figure 9-42. Six blades of grass, each in a separate layer Now it s time to save the brush. Use the same folder you used for simple brushes: the brushes folder in your GIMP profile directory. Use the GIMP brush (animated) type, a .gih extension (Figure 9-43). Figure 9-43. Save with a .gih extension: type GIMP brush (animated). This brings up the Save as Brush Pipe dialog (Figure 9-44). Pipe is another term for an animated brush.
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CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING 371 Figure 9-40. A single blade of grass against a transparent background Make a new layer, and draw another blade of grass. Grass will look more realistic if each blade is a slightly different shade of green as well as a different shape (Figure 9-41). Figure 9-41. A second blade with a different color and shape from the first Continue adding new layers until you re happy. I ll stop at six layers (Figure 9-42).
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370 CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING Spacing is how far apart the images will be when you draw lines and curves with the brush (Figure 9-39). Figure 9-39. Spacing controls how far apart the images will be drawn. After you ve saved a brush, you need to Refresh brushes the button in the lower-right of the Brushes dialog before GIMP will see the new brush. Of course, exiting the GIMP and starting again also works. Then you can use your brush. Although it s fun to draw silly lines made of Wilbers, a more practical use for simple custom brushes is as a stamp, or an image you need to use frequently. Suppose you have a signature that you like to add to your artwork. You could keep your signature in a file, and open it every time you needed to use it, copy it, and then paste it into the new image. But if it s already loaded as a GIMP brush, it s always accessible through the Brushes dialog. Much easier, and you don t need to remember where you stored the file. Animated Brushes The real power of custom brushes is in animated brushes. These are made from images with multiple layers, just like the animated image you made at the end of Chapter 3. As you drag the mouse across the canvas, instead of seeing the same object repeated many times, you ll see slightly different objects. GIMP s Vine brush, and others such as the Pencil Sketch brushes, Felt Pen, Confetti, and Galaxy, all use animation to give you a random-looking, constantly changing line. The animated brushes have a red corner in the Brushes dialog, so you can tell them from other types of brushes. To illustrate, I ll demonstrate how to make a very simple animated brush: grass. Start with a small image. I ll use 50 50 pixels. It shouldn t have any background, just a completely transparent image. (If you start with an image that has a background, Add Alpha Channel followed by Clear can fix that.) Now draw a blade of grass (Figure 9-40). Notice that I zoomed in the window to 400%: it s very hard to draw in a 50 50 window at normal size.
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CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING 369 Figure 9-37. Save as GIMP brush (.gbr) to the brushes directory in your GIMP profile. The right type is GBR, for GIMP brush. You can expand GIMP s Select File Type list and click on GIMP brush, or just save it to a file ending in .gbr and let GIMP figure out the type. Once you click Save in the dialog, you ll be prompted for a Spacing and Description (Figure 9-38). Figure 9-38. Options when saving a brush
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368 CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING You can make spheres with different textures such as glassy, metallic, or leathery: vary the feathering of the selections you fill, and then add textures or reflected objects, perhaps warped with one or more of the Map plug-ins discussed in Chapter 7. You can add color to the shadow, or to the highlighted areas, to emphasize color being reflected from other parts of your artwork. Try different approaches! The more you experiment with light and shadow, the better your art will look. Making Brushes, Patterns, and Gradients The GIMP has a great collection of brushes, gradients, and patterns. But sometimes you need something really specific. How do you make your own? Making Brushes In Chapter 4, you learned how to create parametric brushes. But what if you want to create a brush of a different type? Simple Image Brushes Any image can become a brush. But good brushes will usually be small and have transparent backgrounds. Hey that describes Wilber! How would you go about making Wilber (Figure 9-36) into a GIMP brush? Figure 9-36. Wilber, the GIMP mascot Making an image into a brush is easy just save it in the right place using the right image type (Figure 9-37). The right place is the folder check-marked Writable in Preferences . Folders . Brushes. Tip If you have trouble seeing your GIMP profile folder in the Save as dialog, try clicking on Browse for other folders; then right-click in the file list and select Show Hidden Files.
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CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING 367 Figure 9-34. Add a shadow. Drag the shadow to where it looks right, and you re all set (Figure 9-35). Figure 9-35. The finished sphere Of course, you can modify this technique in all sorts of ways. When you need to shade a complex object, you can draw shadows along one edge of the object using the Paintbrush tool with a fuzzy brush (in a separate layer, of course), or fill complex selections you ve made with tools such as the Lasso tool.
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