This is probably the best tutorial I've come across yet. I was a Gimp user, but went over to Photoshop for a while. Now I'm back to Gimp, and trying to re-learn everything! Certaintly, this is the first time using gimp with a tablet, so those tips you gave will be very useful. The one thing that annoyed me when I started back on Gimp was the lack of an easily-changed brush size. I'm so pleased to see that it is actually possible!!

Here's what i came up with:

I could have added more branches if i had time!

@elfdaughter

Welcome to GIMPtalk (and welcome back to GIMP .

I'm glad you liked the tutorial! GIMP works very well with a tablet, you'll have a lot of fun with it. The resizeable brushes are almost critical to artistic work I think. You'll find them a requirement for essentially all of my own tutorials at least.


@dr-fish

Thanks for trying out the tutorial! It's a nice result, you have blended the colours nicely together forming a smooth continuous trunk, while also letting the background work for you in the sense of having it "shine through" and affect the colours here and there. The lack of many branches is not a problem but possibly you could have been a little more patient with the outermost, thinnest branches, you could have extended these a little more and made them look more like actual branches. Overall it's well done though.

Good job! I'm putting your image up at the top post.
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Griatch

Verry disapointed in myself i see everybody elses and mine looks like poo.

i need posts

@holisterpollak

Well, that's not the way to get posts. Post something useful or don't post at all.

@o88752

It's a nice start. What you need to work on is form and learn to apply the airbrush over the same area multiple times for a stronger contrast. If you follow the tutorial you will also learn to make longer, continuous lines in one stroke, that will help you a lot when doing the tree trunk. Try it a few times, don't give up. If you'd supply me with a thumbnail I'll put your work up at the top "hall of fame".
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Griatch

This is my try ^^:

@FSX

That's a really nice tree! You have good control over the brush and have worked well with the branches, it looks quite realistic. I have very little critique to give on this one, possibly you could try even more shadowing (to enhance contrast and make it clear where light is coming from) as well as adding finer structure on the trunk with a thin brush. But that's for another tutorial. Good one! I'm linking this from the top.
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Griatch

^Mine... I know it needs much more shading on the trunk but it's not a bad start... Is it?

Wonderful tutorial, it gives gimp a whole other aspect other then just "sigging". Here's my result (though I cant say I didn't use erase a couple of times. :a: ,at least I forced my self not to use shif/click )

Hello Griatch,

I found your tutorial on resizable brushes and for now I have two. One solid round and one soft round. Thanks for that.

I would like to know if there is a way to do this with user created brushes. I am attempting to make a brush with a few squiggly lines to use for a HAIR brush. I have a picture of my wife from which I removed her from the background. On one side her hair blended in with the pattern behind her and not all of it could be selected. I need to make the brush resizable to go back and touch up the hair. The only brushes I can make that will resize are done like those in your tutorial. Also the lines I do have only paint as gray.

Do you have any suggestions?

Thank you.

hmmm, I know that you've said it somewere before, but what tablet do you use?

@vivaldiscool

Nice! You have tried some variation to the colour theme, and I think the white highlights works well, gives a good feeling of structure. The shadow is also a nice touch, although I think there might be something off with its perspective; it looks very long considering its angle. You have good use of the brush and smudge/blur and whereas you could have sharpened out the roots a bit more, as well as tried a smaller brush on the outermost branches, I think it came out very well. Good job! I'm linking this from the top post. Oh, and I use an Wacom Intuous 3 for most of my work. Not for this tutorial though, that was done with a mouse.

@tjustleft

What you suggest is a rescalable picture-brush. This is not possible in the stable 2.2 series of GIMP -- only procedural brushes (i.e. those you make in the brush editor as shown in the tutorial) will rescale. However, in the newly-released version 2.4 it's possible, using the scaling feature -- there you can scale up and down any brush regardless of how you made it.
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Griatch

@Griatch tjjustleft

Maybe the question is if is possible to assign a key to that rescale slider to resize even more on the fly,without stop painting

Anyway size is not all...only procedural brush may be blurred rotated or angled

@Photocomix

You can assign a key to the scaling slider just as with the normal brush resize. The shortcut is just not found in the "Context" config menu but in the "Tools" one if I remember correctly. Unfortunately I think you currently have to use two different keys for the "brush resize" and the "brush scale" features however.
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Griatch

:h:
Thank ....that preference menu seems created by a big fan of labyrinths, so a clue as "tools" is quite helpful

Thanks :l: , I actually originally did it with blue on pink like you did, but after I finished that, I decided to have some extra fun by colorizing it and adding a background. And thanks alot for your tips with the shadows, twigs,smudging ect...

However, A wacom Intuous?! aren't those the ones they market to professional artists? how big is the screen? ...or did you just happen to fall into a pile of money.? :w: (btw, the stuff you can do with your mouse is incredible. I'm trying to follow your hand tut now :p )

Screen?...You should be a dreamer ..or maybe you make confusion with CINTIQ
http://www.wacom-europe.com/int/products/cintiq/detailcin21.asp?lang=en

...that is the best and it has a screen even a good one only problem it cost a bit more then a top level desktop

As far i know all other have no screen but just a dull dumb grey board :s:

@vivaldiscool



Photocomix is right, you are confusing the Intuous with the Cintiq. Wacom is a tablet manufacturer that makes a wide range of tablets for graphical use. You are correct that the Intuous is the professional-level tablet, but it's just a tablet, not a pressure-sensitive screen like their Cintiq line. In fact, the Intuous is not ridiculously more expensive than the Graphire or Bamboo (which are their "basic" tablets), but it has several features that most users will have little real use for (or at least will definitely not miss). The step from mouse to any tablet is much greater than any switch between tablets later anyway. Hence I usually recommend people to get the excellent quality Graphire tablet, that'll work for years of doing graphics. If my old Graphire wasn't so old it lacked an USB connector I would still use that I reckon.

A Cintiq would be very cool indeed to have, but that's very expensive as you said. Here, it costs much more than a whole new computer. ^_^;

Thanks for the kind words on my works -- looking forward to seeing you try the advanced airbrushing tutorial (the one with the hand).
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Griatch

hey i gave it a shot it isnt that great tho
EDIT:(here is an updated better vesion of the tree

@dr_ownage

Hello and thanks for trying out the tutorial!

You got down to using the transparency of the airbrush, which is good. You also tried some variation to the colours, nice. You need to be more patient though, and scale down your brush to smaller sizes so that you gradually can "sharpen" the initial blurry sketch of a tree. I also don't think you separated th background from the foreground. It can be seen from you painting the green ground "around" the roots. This is just a matter of practice, you will find having the background on a separate layer will make things much easier for you.

It also looks like you have a smaller version of this image lingering to the left -- why is that? An issue of rescaling? You have incoorperated light around the branches, this is a good touch, you just need to balance the use of large and small-size brushes more to bring the tree into focus.

All in all, thanks for trying it out and hope you had fun! Try doing a few more trees, you'll find these things is only a matter of repeating enough times. Make the branches with straight lines, and you'll find it gets even easier.

If you could supply me with a smaller thumbnail of your image I'll post it up at the top post!
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Griatch

Didn't really follow your tut since I did it on my computer without internet.
EDIT: I've started usung the zoom feature and 50% opacity (with opacity pressure sensitivity) and my trees have gotten better.

@Linkmasta

Well, despite not following the tutorial, you got a tree down. It's not a bad start, but try working with larger brushes to begin with (use the resizable brushes you set up in this tutorial), laying down the base structure. You can switch to smaller lines and bruhes after that. That way shades will blend better together and you can add things like shadows easier.
Keep practicing, I'm putting this up at the top with the rest.
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Griatch

@Griatch:

All brushes are resizeable in 2.4 :w:

Lol, true. Reminds me that I should add an update to the tutorial.
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Griatch