Creating a roll of parchment in GIMP

[Ghostman]

STEP 7: What about the parchment?

The final step in the process is to texture and highlight the parchment using the same techniques as we did with the wooden discs. Create a Rolls highlight layer and apply gradient to the upper and lower rolls, one at a time. Set the blend mode to Overlay.



Create a new layer called Paper and make sure it's below the Rolls highlight layer. Add a black mask to this layer, select both the rolls and the connecting parchment shapes, feather the selection and white-fill the mask with it. Then fill the layer itself with a paper or parchment texture.



Hiding all the unneeded layers and displaying only the highlights and textured layers should result in a complete scroll. For final tweaks, you can make copies of the highlight layers and modify their blend modes and opacities. You can also experiment with filters and scripts. I used the Clothify effect on the parchment texture.



Advanced users can undoubtedly think of many ways to do things more efficiently and add more bells and whistles. This tutorial ends here though, as it is meant as a simple guide for those who know the basics of GIMP or some other image editing software. I hope it has been useful to fellow forumers here.

Feel free to point out typos and grammatical errors and the like.