Wow, a week in and I already missed two planned tutorials. At least I've got a decent excuse. My cord was misplaced and I was away from home for a week. But here's something to make up for it: a lovely tutorial! A couple years back I kept searching for how to make a paint splatter effect in Gimp. No dice. Instead I wound up finding a lot of blood splatter effect tutorials. Kind of a weird thing to find in abundance, but not paint splatter. Okay then. Well, I used the same concept to create a paint splatter effect and I'm finally getting around to sharing that knowledge.
So it doesn't look that insanely impressive, I know. But what we're going to do with it is a lot more fun.
At first I started this post with the idea of just showing how to make the paint splatter background, but then I decided to just mess around with putting it as a text form. And I love the effect more than I originally liked it. So now I'm going to pass the information on! It's pretty easy and once you get the hang of it you should be pretty quick at it. And by learning how to extract a background as text you can apply it to all kinds of images. In case you don't quite get what I mean (I'm a visual person, too don't worry.) here's a picture of the final effect:
Step 1: Open a new image. The size depends on what project you're working on and how big you want it to be. I used a standard 640x400 px.
Step 2: Change your background color to black or whatever color your heart desires with the bucket tool or by dragging the colored square onto your canvas.
Step 3: Open a new layer. Seriously don't forget. I redid the video tutorial like 5 times just because I forgot to open a new layer. Don't forget. Make it transparent and name it if you want
Step 4: Press the brushes tool and use the sparks brush. It looks sort of like a sun and should be in the original set of default brushes that come with Gimp.
Step 5: Paint around the canvas a bit, but don't go too crazy. This is just for one color. It looks most realistic if you vary the size and the jitter
Step 6: Go to the Colors menu and then to colorize.
Step 7: Mess around with the levels until you're happy.
Step 8: Repeat this on new layers for each color. Yes, I got lazy and used one I had already done. I had like 3 finished ones and I didn't feel like another.
Step 9: Go to the Layer menu then new from visible. This will make the color splatters and the background one layer which will make things easier later.
Step 10: Type in whatever you're desiring.
Step 11: Move it around to whatever part of the pattern you like the most. Resize or whatever you want. Then left click on your text layer and click Alpha to Selection (near the bottom). This selects the text.
Step 12: Make sure the new from visible layer is selected. Go to the Select menu and press invert. This means we are now selecting the new from visible background around the text instead of the text selection itself now.
Step 13: Go to the Edit menu then press cut (CTRL-X for PC). Or press delete on your keyboard. This cuts out the background surrounding the text so that we are just left with the shape of the text.
Step 14: Go to menu Select then none (Shift + CTRL+ A). This means that nothing is selected. Now make the text layer invisible (press the eye icon next to it). And now you can see your nifty picture text!
Step 15: Now this part is up to you. If you're using it for something that you don't want a background for (as in how it appears below) then export it as a .png and you're done. If you want a background then create your new layer and color it how you please. Just make sure the background layer is behind your nifty text.
And you are done! This can be done with a lot of different cool effects.
The font I used can be found here. It is one of the many cool chalk fonts that I found online. Definitely a cool font! Check it out and the other tons of font on dafont.com It's my favorite site for fonts!
The video tutorial version will be coming soon. I just need to get the process down enough and get some decent audio and you can follow along with it. Woo!
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