GIMP: Eggs and Daisies

I created this egg shape a couple of weeks ago when I was playing around with mapping objects into various shapes.  I made sure to rotate my selection so that the best part of the egg was showing before saving the result.  Next I stamped the oval version of the egg shape onto a measured background, stamping the vertical and horizontal eggs and then fitting in the 45 degree angled eggs.  Then I resized the original egg to make it a circle and stamped those on the edges and in the middle.  I selected all the eggs, inverted the selection and made a shaped gradient background which I then bevelled (ha, ha, bevelled eggs, ha, ha!).  I re-inverted the selection and applied the bevel option to make the eggs stand out a bit.

Next I made a set of related images, based on the egg image (before I had added the gradient background.  As the eggs had been made with a transparent background while they were being shaped into spheres, the mosaics that I made from them also had a transparent background.  I learned a little GIMP weakness, however, which is if you choose the option of having background light show through it overrides the clear background and you can't get it back!  From then on the mosaics will be created with a colored background.

Here is one I made where I used square mosaics with a slight amount of variation.

Here I opened a square of the same size as the egg images and applied just the current bump map to the new image.  What I got was the wrinkles of the original eggs, and the shaped gradient around them.

I turned the image above into a ball as well, but I will have to play ball with it later, because I have the project below to work on....

So here is my original egg square, in the center, with two color variations on either edge (I kept the eggs selected in the original egg square so I could easily change the color of just the eggs and not the background; it was important to have done that because reselecting the egg shapes, with all their color variations, would have been a huge pain.) I filled in two sides with the bump map version and the remaining 4 squares with various mosaic versions and slightly different background colors.

The version above seemed a bit bland, me being the queen of oversaturated color!  So I applied color alpha and made a series of similar images over different backgrounds.  Here is one:

And another, this time over a circular gradient so the middle seems to glow and the sides grow dark.

 This was over a lighter gradient, giving a less intense result.

 And this one was over a greenish gradient, which again changed the atmosphere of the graphics.

I really just love color and all the things you can do with it!

Next I took an earlier mosaic I had made, deep rich colors using triangles, and selected a 6 triangle shape.  I need to make permanent stamps out of more of these so I don't have to hunt down a mosaic before I use the stamps.  Anyway, here I experimented with various sizes and transparencies of the stamp over a gold to purple gradient.  In some places I have also used the stamp as an eraser (the small gold pairs, as the original background was gold), as a dodge tool (the single, whitish stamps) and as a burn tool (the single, darker versions with colors that change according to what color is being intensified).  I made the original stamp image much smaller and used it with the bucket tool to fill in certain triangles.  All of this looked pleasant enough  but seemed to be buried in mist, with no defined edges.

I gave it more bite by using the cartoon tool.  Also it did something interesting to the daisy stamps.  Originally the mosaic tiles can be chosen to have various heights, which are of course controlled by the apparence of darker and lighter portions of the triangles.  When I applied the cartoon tool, and slid both selection bars to get the amount of dark that I wanted, it made the triangle shapes seem to recede rather than look raised.  The small bucket-applied versions look like lace or wire mesh placed underneath a cut-out surface.

I wanted to make a new Facebook cover image.  Here is a version I tried before applying the cartoon tool.  Spacey but indistinct.

Here is a different version I made using the cartoon tool.  Much more complex and dimensional, though a bit strange looking overall.

And last is an image I made based on the cartoon version of the original image.  I put the whole thing over a gradient background that was large enough for 4 images across.  Instead of 4 I spread out 3, then made meandering flower stamps in the gaps.  Then I took that panel and in turn put it on a larger image, leaving horizontal gaps, which I then filled in with very small, pencil lines created by the original stamp.

This last image looks very dimensional.  The rectangles based on gold to purple gradients look like they are receding, the vertical strips are on top of them and the horizontal stripes on top of all.  A strange, yet pleasing, image.

I seem to be developing some strange habits in GIMP.  While I may not be making any textiles based on my GIMP images, I seem to be basing my GIMP images on textiles!  I "dye" and "stamp" things, I piece them together like patchwork.  I make lace and rounded beads, I use translucent colors like overdyed fabric or like filmy silken fabric.  Ultimately I doubt I will really convert all that many of them to actual fabric, but I hope to hold what I've learned about design somewhere in my head and will apply it when I reach a new medium.