I follow the Church Marketing Lab on Twitter (I’m @dysleeper, if you are so inclined). Â They usually toss up a couple of interesting links a day and today’s was to Bittbox which is a tutorials and resources site for graphic designers. Â Right now, I’m either half or three-quarters of the graphic design team for our congregation so this is of interest to me.
One of the many, many packages of textures that caught my eye was smoke. Â I downloaded the images and mucked about with them for a while in the GIMP and this was the result:
fig. 1
Tutorial of sorts follows.
I started out with this fairly basic texture that I thought looked kind of neat:
fig. 2
I made a new layer (fig. 3) and used the gradient tool (fig. 4) with this crazy, funky gradient (fig. 5)
fig. 3
fig. 4
fig. 5
Which I then applied more or less parallel to the way the smoke texture curled (fig. 6)
fig. 6
Next, I made a layer mask by right-clicking on the tropical colours layer, selecting ‘add layer mask’ and choosing a white (full opacity) mask:
fig. 7
Select everything on the background layer by first left-clicking where it says “Background” to make the layer active and then hit Ctrl+A. Â Now, hit Ctrl+C. Â There is now a copy of the (conveniently) black and white smoke layer in the clipboard. Â Select the ‘New Layer’ (tropical colours layer) and hit Ctrl+V to paste it from the clipboard. Â It shows up as a Floating Selection (fig. 8). Â Choose any of the selection tools from the tool box (fig. 9) and click in the grey area outside the image. Â The cursor will be shaped like a cross-hair with an anchor near it (it is hard to get a screenshot of such a thing).
fig. 8
fig. 9
This results in the following:
fig. 10
Right click on the “new layer” and select “apply layer mask.” Â From the drop down menu above the layers list (see where it says “Normal” in Fig. 7), select “Color” (it is an American program). Â This sets the way the layer we’ve just made affects the layer below. Â The result is Fig. 1 .