Merit.oryo.us

With this post, I hope to start the first of a three or four part post tutorial on how to create a realistic bulletin board using our beloved Gimp. The result were striving for is something more or less what I have on my fleshed out, but not completely finished home page. At the end of the post we should have the following.

To start, create a new 800×600 image and set the fill to transparent. Now let’s get to work on the frame. What we’d like to do is create a 20px wide frame all the way around the image. So pop quiz, hot shot, how ya gonna do it?

Well, if you don’t have any ideas, you can always do what I did (After all, this is a tutorial). I selected the entire image. You can use the Fuzzy Select tool (magic wand) if you like or Select->All. Then I shrunk the selection by 20px (Select->Shrink). The last step is to invert the selection.

Now create a new layer (Layer->New Layer) and call it “Frame”. With the layer active, fill the frame with #dba368.

Next, we want to give the frame some feel. It looks way to flat and bland. Therefore, let’s add to level to the frame. This is really nothing more than a frame for our frame. Do do this create a new layer and call it “Frame Bevel”. Select the paintbrush and the Circle Fuzzy brush with a 7px radius. We also need to use a darker shade of brown (#af6a31 worked for me). Make sure the “Frame Bevel” layer is active and then paint a border around the frame. This can easily be achieved if you zoom in to 800%. Go to the top left and dot the corner with the dark brown. Now scroll all the way to the bottom and hold down SHIFT and CRTL. You should see a line. This is what will be painted when you click the mouse. Go ahead and move the cross hair down to the lower left corner and give your mouse a click. You should have a nice straight line. Continue your way around the frame until you make it back up to where you started. Do the same with the inner part of the frame but with a lighter color (#f6cba0 should do).

Let’s check our progress…

Now that’s not to bad. We used a fuzzy brush to give us several shades of brown and thus give us the bevel effect. However, it looks like we over did it a bit. Let’s try to sharpen up the inner portion of the frame. To do this, select the Eraser tool and the circle brush with a 5px radius. Zoom in again and use the same trick to go around the frame and shave of about 1/3 of the bevel on the inside.

Now we have our frame. Let’s add the corkboard. At stock.xchng I found this image of a corkboard. Grap it and open it up. As is, its way to large. Scale it down to 1000×800 and copy it. Now paste it in (Edit -> Paste Into). Pull up the Layer dialog and make a new layer out of the pasted layer (corkboard). Press the new layer button to do this and move the board underneath the other layers.

The final touch is an inner shadow for the corkboard. Switch to the “Frame” layer and and select the frame. Feather the selection by 10px (Select->Feather). Next, create a new layer and call it “Inner Shadow”. Fill the selection with black. For more help with technique, you can check out my Inner Shadows tutorial.

That’s it. Here’s the xcf file.

Next time we’ll add some “flair”.

Now available, part 2 of building a bulleting board, Grids and Guides. Check it out.

Posted in Gimp |