The Book of GIMP

3.5 The Digital Painting Process

In this section, you get to look over the shoulder of a digital painter as she develops a complete landscape painting in GIMP. Although this isn’t a follow-along tutorial, it shows you how a digital painter plans and executes a moderately complex piece, and you get to see a variety of practical techniques and tricks in action.

Composition

I’ll begin by creating layers for each major aspect of the landscape, going from the most distant (the sky in Figure 3-86) to the closest element (the river in Figure 3-92) in Figure 3-86 to Figure 3-92. I initialize each layer with a transparent background, so the layers behind show through. At this stage, I just use basic paintbrush strokes to get a general idea of the composition. ...