370 CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING Spacing is (Web hosting rating)
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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