Art 4

This was done using Gimp 1.2 (with standard extras and perl-fu)

This is the final artwork "Sapphire, Steel and Stars":

  1. Spend hours looking for just the right picture. (grin)
  2. Remove all background, leaving Sapphire and Steel. With this one, it was rather hard to see the edges because the photo was so dark, so I duplicated the layer, made it brighter, and did a Layer Mask for that layer. When I was satisfied, I did Mask-to-Selection, (I might have inverted the selection, I'm not sure) and then did Edit -> Cut on the darker layer. Delete the bright layer (don't need it anymore). Call the newly-cut layer "sapphire-steel".
  3. The starry background is a combination of two images from my collection of "outer space" images. First I found a very pretty galaxy image, but it was too small. So I also found a larger but plainer starry image.
    1. Make a new layer below sapphire-steel. Call it "stars".
    2. Open the large starry image as another image in Gimp.
    3. Edit -> Copy.
    4. Click on the sapphire-steel image. Make sure you have "stars" as the current layer. Edit -> Paste. You now have a Floating Selection. Move it around a bit if you want. Click on it to anchor it when you're happy.
    5. Close the large starry image, you don't need it any more.
    6. Open the small galaxy image as another image in Gimp. Edit -> Copy.
    7. Click on the sapphire-steel image. Edit -> Paste. You now have a Floating Selection. Move it around a bit until it's positioned just right.
    8. When you are satisfied, click on the New Layer button. The "Floating Selection" layer is now a new layer called "Pasted Selection".
    9. Hide everything but "stars" and "Pasted Selection". Merge Visible Layers. Call the combined layer "stars".
    10. Close the small galaxy image, you don't need it any more.
    11. Show "sapphire-steel" again.
  4. Flatten image and save as .jpg Undo and repeat for different backgrounds if you can't make up your mind.