Here's my attempt at using the ideas and techniques from the Zombie Nirvana podcasts. Before I started this, my skills in GIMP were limited to basic photo editing. Now, although I'm working with an older version (2.2 - grrr that nobody has made a package for 2.4 for older Ubuntu installations), I'm managing to figure my way through some of this.



Things I've had to adapt for GIMP:

- Patterns - scaling isn't done on the fly (I think that's possible in 2.4) but I create separate images for the patterns, scale them and put them in the pattern's folder. It's a bit more time consuming, but I get the same effect. I do a bucket fill into a new layer. I created two layers for two different forest patterns (just offset/horiz flipped one) and carefully masked that way.

- The wood cut. Oy. There's a separate post (do a search on wood block) where RobA talked about how to use the Newsprint filter to duplicate the wood cut. I masked, created the basic lake shape, put it in a separate image, applied a gauss blur (two of them), merged layers, converted to grayscale, applied the newsprint and the copied/pasted back to my full image. Tedious, but I couldn't seem to make grayscale layers in an RGB image. Maybe there's a way to do this with thresholds, but I'm at the limit of my GIMP knowledge with all this.

So here's where I'm at and I'm about to move to podcasts 7 through 10. I'm very certain I'll have tons more questions.

Neurowiz