So I'm going to try get my head around GIMP. It's more complicated but has tons more features, plus its free to use. Below is the GIMP dashboard with a hello message I made. :)
There are a plethora of Youtube tutorials for GIMP so I started off by watching a few guides for beginners. One tutorial showed you how to remove part of an image and put it over a new background. Below is my first try at this!
GIMP works by separating different elements of the image into layers so you can work on each element without affecting the others. It takes a bit of getting used to switching between layers all the time.
Next I decided to go ahead and work on a banner I wanted to make for my food blog. I'm going to be making a food from every American state. I watched a few tutorials on adding text to an image including techniques to make the text stand out more.
For this banner I added a background image. Then added text in two places using text boxes. I made extra layers for each of the text boxes, increased the size of the text on those layers by a few pixels and filled it in white to make it stand out and emphasise the black text. I'm pleased with how it turned out but it was a slow process of trying different things before I finally figured it all out.
I then went on to make a few other banners/images I'd been meaning to get sorted.
It's very satisfying to be able to make a banner and put it up on my blog, I think it improves how my blog posts look.
To try doing something different I decided to try make a book cover. I picked an old mystery book I like, The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne. I thought of some ideas for a cover and then tried to put them into practise.
I had the idea of a house reflected in water because a pond features in the mystery. I used the Path Tool in GIMP to select the reflection (in a similar way to the scissor tool I'd used to cut out JD in the picture above) and then made it a separate layer so I could colour it red without messing up the rest of the image. I think it works quite well. I then gave the image a border by making a background in black a few pixels bigger then the image and added some text in an old fashioned font. I really like how's it turned out.
Again this kind of practical learning where you just play around to figure things out along with googling tutorials to find what you can't is just what I like to do. I've asked JD for advice here and there too as he's been using GIMP for years and is quite the pro!
I'm pleased with my months work, I've made a lot of banners for my blogs plus got a good start on learning about the different features. There's so much more to learn but as I use GIMP from now on I'll add to my knowledge.
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