This uses noclayto's foil paper as a springboard.

Here is an example of the finished product: This also might be useful in conjunction with the Scott Effect to make a treebark texture.





Start with a blank white image and do the click all over thing with the gradient tool, as per noclayto's Foil Paper tutorial (one thing I did discover is that you want to have adaptive supersampling turned off...its slooooowww).

Once you have that, stop there, you want things to be rounded not sharp as for the foil paper.

Next, add a new transparent layer and do filters>render>clouds>plasma. Max out the turbulence setting.

Blure the layer with Gaussian blur for a 10 pixel radius.

Next, fire up Iwarp (filters>distorts>iwarp) and set your deform radius to 50. Use the CW and CCW tools to get something like the image below:



Now filters>artistic>oilify the layer, set at 15



Then do filters>artistic>cubism with a value of 10 (on larger files you may have to twiddle the values for oilify and cubistic. And yes, this is part of the lava script fu...it gave me the idea.



Next, repeat the oilify, same settings.

Now do filters>edge detect>edge. Use Sobel and max out the setting. You should get somthing like the image below.



Do Select>by color and select a black area. With this selected, do edit>cut. Now you will have mostly the lightning like highlight areas. Set the layer properties of this layer to darken only. Try fiddling with the opacity. The next two show the effects of this, kinda cool by themselves actually...by the way, you can also try this with your earlier iwarped version, gives a really neat looking iridescent foil effect.




Do Layer>colors>desaturate. Do layer>colors>curves like below, or play with the settings, I like to pump the high values a bit.



Do filters>map>bump map. Bump map the layer to itself. It will look kinda ugly:



Use layers>colors>colorize to tweak the color to your liking, you get something like this:



Okay, so how do we make the sort of "vertical wrinkles?"

Make a new transparent layer just above your first layer. Using the gradient tool set to normal (back from difference) and using a triangular repeat, put your cursor at one edge of your image and drag your gradient line maybe an eigth of the way into your image. This will make a set of repeating gradient bars across your image, like this:



Set layer property for this layer to difference. It will merge it with the gradient foil layer you first made. Clear as mud?

Now for a couple of variations, this one has the bump mapped layer duplicated, but set to grain extract, the effect is of the two layers combined. Try setting the second layer to different things like multiply or soft light, cool effects. Very H.R. Geigerish.

A variant I just created. The -mecury worms- were done with solid noisem (use turbulence) with the levels tweaked kind of like what is used to make lightning. Then select by color was used to remove the black areas of the image.

very..... unusual but it looks kool

whoa...any chance on making a tut about the metal worm things?

cool but i am confuzed :a:

You had me up until this point. What do I do here?

Do you know how to set layer properties? Actually, the drop down box in the layers tab says "Layer mode". Is this what is giving you trouble?

how do you do "the �click all over� with the gradient tool"?

Looks like something in this forum's filesystem got corrupted. The "�click all over�" wasn't part of my original message.

Pick your gradient tool, set the mode to difference, and just start clicking at random all over your canvas, you will get sort of random blotches where the gradient "interferes" with itself.

I am at work right now, or I would post a picture to show you what it looks like. If the above doesn't help, I will try to post a picture later this evening.

Strange...My IWarp isn't working. Infact it never has. :s:

Did you know you have to phyisicaly swirl the picture in the Iwarp box?

well that would explain it i was wondering why it wasnt warping either, thank u

im really new to gimp
so i dont know what your taqlking about

Which part don't you understand?

me 2 on the iwarp - not cooking, but it's all good

For Iwarp to make any changes, you have to click on the screen on the top left :w:

nice tut but bit confusing oh well lol

Which part confused you?

well I found this part quite confusing



honestly i will be embrassed to do the "�" and at lost to click all over "�"; also find the correct "noclato�" tutorial seems quite complex :w:

i suppose something wrong happen on that text line , how it is now is far to be clear

looking better that "�" issue is recursive in the tut ...not only in the first lines...maybe are screwed up links

BTW i like a lot the variant even more then the first result (is closer for me to Alien skin)

I'll have to see if I can fix it....wonder what happened to it?

GT layout was changed time ago, when html attachment where eliminated ...and sometimes their ghosts survived as "򟿤"or similar

so everytime you wrote as example [url]Iwarp[/url] with "Iwarp" be also[highlight] a link[/highlight] with his realated help page result is that word
" iwarp " is replaced with "�"and link is lost

I'm wonder how much other tutorials could suffer a similar problem

Well, hopefully it is fixed. I deleted a bit at the end due to the missing image from ImageShack.

This is super confusing... I tried making my own varient of the tutorial, but failed misierably and came up with this:

Sorry about that. this is one of my first tutorials. I did notice that there was no link to the noclayto tutorial mentioned at the beginning. I have fixed this. Here is the link that I added at the beginning.

http://www.gimptalk.com/forum/topic/Foil-Paper-329-1.html