Art 6: Astro Geek
On the Importance Of Nice Brushes.
This was done using Gimp 2.2
This is the artwork "Samantha Carter: Astro Geek":
I'm going to be very brief with this one, just describing the different layers and how I got them.
- We have the main image layer itself, sam1, which has had half its background zapped (as described in Background Zapping).
- Above it is sam2, which is a duplicate of sam1, desaturated, in overlay mode, at 50% opacity, to make Sam look clearer.
- Below, we have the background layers. The lowest visible layer is opaque black, normal.
- Above it is a transparent layer with some lovely star brushes done in white. (I got them from the GIMP Brush section of Deviant Art).
- The next layer is interesting.
- Filters -> Render -> Clouds -> Plasma
- Filters -> Distorts -> Whirl and Pinch
- But the opacity of the layer is set at 40% so one can see the stars through it.
- Above that are two "wash" layers; each one has a spiral gradient fill (a gradient I made called DirtySun) of a slightly different diameter, and both are in Overlay mode.
- And then we have the layers above Sam. Three of these are transparent layers with various "technical" brushes which I also got from Deviant Art. They have varying levels of opacity; some brushes were semi-transparent already, others had to be made more transparent.
- And on top, there is a transparent layer with a 1-pixel black border (see General Icon Techniques for how to make a transparent 1-pixel border).