GIMP Bible

Chapter 11. Painting in GIMP

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Using GIMP's brushes

• Getting fancy with the Ink tool

• Working with gradients and patterns

GIMP's main purpose is to allow users to edit and manipulate existing images. It's not primarily designed to serve as a complete digital painting application for generating original art from scratch. That being the case, all of GIMP's painting tools are targeted toward facilitating photo retouching, image enhancement, and compositing. Despite that, these tools are generalized and powerful enough that you can still use them to create original digital paintings, and many GIMP artists do just that. They use these tools to create digital images for print or to set as desktop wallpaper. They're also commonly used to create textures that can be applied to 3D models used in film and video game animations.

In this process, a texture artist paints an image and that image is applied to the surface of 3D mesh object as a texture. This can take a plastic and sterile-looking computer-generated object and give it a unique life and grit that brings it into the realm of believability. Figure 11-1 shows an example texture painted in GIMP and the 3D character it was applied to.

This chapter explains how GIMP's various painting tools work and how you can get the most out of them. The chapter focuses on the painting tools that don't necessarily require you to have any image data to start with. This includes brush-based tools like the Pencil, Paintbrush, Eraser, and Airbrush ...