A Gimp Tutorial Part 2

 

Back to part 1  Forward to Part 3

 

Come back for more, eh?  Well, lets see… start out by opening your .xcf wall file up (the gimp native) It should still be in layers and ready to work with again.

 

The first thing I want to do is make an “outside wall” so that we can texture our wall differently, yet have the windows line up.  I want to start off by showing you how to take tileable textures which you can find for free on the web, and turn them into Gimp patterns.  First, lets find a nice exterior wall texture:  How about this one?

 

Stone Wall

 

 

Lets open this picture up in the gimp, and we will now turn it into a pattern for our uses!  All we need to do, since this is a tileable texture already, is save it right away, as a .pat file, in the proper location.  You can read the file path in this picture, your pattern file should be in the same place.

 

Save as Pattern

 

And next, give the pattern a description.  This name is what will show up in the tool palate.  If you don’t adjust, every pattern you include will say “Gimp Pattern”   And that’s not always helpful, since you don’t see much of the texture in the sample on the palate.

 

 

Ok, now that we have our pattern, lets modify our previous project.  All we have to do is choose the paint bucket, select the wallpaper layer, make sure the paint bucket is set to use “Pattern fill”, select all, and dump it in there.

 

 

New Wall Texture

 

 

 

 

Ok, cool, but our wall is lumpy, and the shadow isn’t.  What to do???  Well I would first make the shadow solid again, so I can see what I’m doing, then modify it with the erase tool.  Just select the layer you want to work on (middle shadow) and create an undulating shadow that makes sense for the surface.  Use the magnifying glass tool to zoom in a bit, it helps a lot.  Make sure you adjust your “tool footprint” to something pretty small, so you have more control, then work it so it looks something like this:

 

 

Shadow adjusted

 

 

Outdoor shadows tend to be a little stronger, so I’m going to adjust this shadow to more like 75% on the transparency bar in the Layers Window.  So, here is the finished product, if you like, right click on it, and choose Save Target As…..

 

 

Outside Wall

 

 

Ok, if you like, go on to Gimp Tutorial Part 3 to make a glass pane for the window,

Or you can go back to the First tutorial