GIMP Stroke Styles

The way I've been doing illustrations in GIMP up to this point has included importing paths from Inkscape and applying a stroke to that path. That stroke is usually a solid black line of some appropriate width. But what if I'd like to add a bit more life to my inkwork? In this post I'll try to experiment a bit with the Stroke Styles and different Tool Settings.

So, I start by creating a pretty random path with some nice quirks. I also split it in the sharp corners to make the strokes as authentic as possible. I figure that if you'd draw it by hand you would probably stop in these places and restart on the next section.

My random path to stroke.

I duplicate this path a bunch of times, aligns them and distributes them nicely over the workspace. Then it's time to go nuts.To stroke the path in GIMP, simply right click the path in the Paths dialog and seelct Stroke Path... to open the Stroke Path dialog. This is also available from the main menu.

The Stroke Path dialog.

Basic Lines

I start of with the basic line, first a solid 15 pixels wide one and then, by expanding the Line Style part and selecting the "Dense Dots" dash preset, I create a dotted line. 

Basic lines.

Using paint tools

After that I select the Pencil Tool and set up the Tool Settings for this by selecting the circular "Hardness 100" brush and setting it to a wide 25 pixels size. I'll use pretty wide strokes here just to make all differences visible. Then in the Stroke Path dialog, instead of Stroke Line, I check Stroke with a paint tool and then select the Pencil in the drop down and click Stroke. Then I do the same for both Paintbrush and Ink. I can not say I understand the Ink Tool, all I know is that I had to lower the size to 16 pixels and it still was very wide. Strange... A topic for another blog post maybe....

Stroke using different paint tools.

Dynamics

I've noticed the little Emulate brush dynamics check box in the Stroke Path dialog so I checked this and tried again, and, lo and behold, the Ink stroke was suddenly thinner and with nice endings. Beautiful! When I'm on it I'll try out the Paintbrush with some different Dynamics as well.

Strokes with emulated brush dynamics. Click to enlarge image.

I think I'm happy for now, this will not only be good to use when applying strokes to a path but will also be a good reference to different dynamics when using my tablet to draw, I know there are more settings to fiddle around with in this area but - for now - I'm satisfied.

10-4 //Niklas

Trying to find my way...

I've been messing around with Gimp for some days now just to get the hang of using the pen and tablet. I've realized it's actually super hard to draw straight lines and circles when not looking at your hand. If I was a pro I'd walk straight to the nearest tech-store and bought myself a Wacom Cintiq, Wacom Cintiq Companion or a Surface Pro 3. As it feels right now I need one of those fellas in my life but I'm going to try to be comfy with the Intuos, learning to draw while looking at the screen rather than my hand. 

I also heard about Krita the other day, downloaded it and tried it out. I'm not going to write a big review on that. Yet. But I need to just mention two things, real quick. First, immediately after installation, with no fiddling around what so ever, the Wacom-tablet just worked. No. Problems. At. All. I'm gobsmacked. Second, I didn't really bond with the brushes, I tried to twist a few knobs and yank a few cranks but, meh. They just didn't feel right. Plus I couldn't find a way to make the eraser remove everything at once (like 100 opacity, but for an eraser) I had to really rub the pen an table to really remove the paint. For me, as useless I am with the physical action of painting I'd destroy both pen and tablet if I needed to do that. So, straight back to Gimp it is. 

Below is a few of the sketches I've made the last week. High and low, I'm quite happy with a couple of them and a couple of them are straight garbage. But, whatever, I see them as practice for the muscles and eyes. If nothing else, this week I've learned that I need a plan, an idea. No two characters I create has something in common. Completely different styles. I need to come up with a more defined set of boundaries now during the start up.

So, I guess it's time to get back to the drawing board for now. For the next post I hope to have some more ideas on how to set up some rules and boundaries to steer myself towards a style, a genre, a character or, well, anything.

10-4. //Niklas

P.S. Now: