Playing with mountains

[Karro]

Nope- no size jitter, no rotation jitter. Brush dynamics in GIMP are quite a bit behind photoshop (at least in some areas). Size jitter doesn't bother my that much, as you can tie size to tablet pressure, but no help if using a mouse.

It is pretty easy, however to create a custom brush that provides random size and rotation jitters...Just not as flexible.

-Rob A>

Does it have to be done via an animated brush? I haven't tried my hand at that, yet...

[jfrazierjr]

Does it have to be done via an animated brush? I haven't tried my hand at that, yet...

I would believe anything the GIMP guru says. RobA kind of told me how to do this in another post just a few days ago, and he used some of the same techniques in his post today to make the palm trees. From what I understand, you make 1 layer for each individual thing. So, if you want 10 squares at different sizes you make one per layer, set them all visible and save it as a GIMP pipe brush (or whatever). Then, when you select the brush, pencil, or airbrush tool and that "brush" as you stroke, it will cycle between the layers to spit out the image on said layer. Not easy, but it's once and done. If you want to test it, just to two layers with drastically different shapes or colored thingies and then give it a try. I hope to make a few copies with different colors of my hand drawn mountains in the next few days and post them up for everyone to use(assuming I get it done and assuming it looks ok).

Joe

[torstan]

One thing that is worth noting is that if the images in the brush are greyscale then they will draw the given image with the colour you pick for the brush. So a black circle will actually draw a red line if red is picked. Shades of grey going to white correspond to transparency for these brushes. Therefore you could create a greyscale mountain brush with different mountains in it. Then the user could paint with it with whatever colour they wanted - or even check the use colour from gradient button and pick a nice mountain gradient (say the default Gimp browns gradient) to draw mountains with a nice variation in colour.

[Karro]

I would believe anything the GIMP guru says. RobA kind of told me how to do this in another post just a few days ago, and he used some of the same techniques in his post today to make the palm trees. From what I understand, you make 1 layer for each individual thing. So, if you want 10 squares at different sizes you make one per layer, set them all visible and save it as a GIMP pipe brush (or whatever). Then, when you select the brush, pencil, or airbrush tool and that "brush" as you stroke, it will cycle between the layers to spit out the image on said layer. Not easy, but it's once and done. If you want to test it, just to two layers with drastically different shapes or colored thingies and then give it a try. I hope to make a few copies with different colors of my hand drawn mountains in the next few days and post them up for everyone to use(assuming I get it done and assuming it looks ok).

Joe

One thing that is worth noting is that if the images in the brush are greyscale then they will draw the given image with the colour you pick for the brush. So a black circle will actually draw a red line if red is picked. Shades of grey going to white correspond to transparency for these brushes. Therefore you could create a greyscale mountain brush with different mountains in it. Then the user could paint with it with whatever colour they wanted - or even check the use colour from gradient button and pick a nice mountain gradient (say the default Gimp browns gradient) to draw mountains with a nice variation in colour.

Cool. I will be trying this asap.

[RobA]

Here is a tutorial I made a while back back on setting up a rotating brush (so it angles in the direction you paint). The exact same process for random, just pick "random" rather than "angular" in the Ranks section of the save dialog.

-Rob A>

[jfrazierjr]

One thing that is worth noting is that if the images in the brush are greyscale then they will draw the given image with the colour you pick for the brush. So a black circle will actually draw a red line if red is picked. Shades of grey going to white correspond to transparency for these brushes. Therefore you could create a greyscale mountain brush with different mountains in it. Then the user could paint with it with whatever colour they wanted - or even check the use colour from gradient button and pick a nice mountain gradient (say the default Gimp browns gradient) to draw mountains with a nice variation in colour.

Oh DAMN! Rob told me this the other day when I was doing my hand drawn "V" mountains with the whole smudge thing and asked how to get it to pick a random series of images to paint, but it did not sink in what he said about the whole grayscale aspect.

Thanks for the follow up clarification Torstan!

Joe