Gimp Class -

Warning, long post with pretty pictures coming up.

For those who do not know, Gimp is an open source (free) photo editing programme.   I have had it for some time now, but after an earlier try at learning it, gave up and have mainly  been using it for cropping and scaling photos.  For some time I have wanted to take Sharon's Class.

When I saw the size of the first lesson I thought I would never get through it, but those 41 pages were so full of information and is so interesting it makes me want to just keep going.  By the time I revised lesson 1 and got to lesson 2 I found myself clapping my hands every time I got something right.....even if I had been over and over it 20 times without success.

Now I am loving it and cant wait for Thursdays when the next lesson comes out.

I am very fortunate that when I made a foray into Gimp some time ago, it was set up for me by my big son, who is in the IT business, and subsequently tweeked by my darling Anthony who lives locally and who is amazing when it comes to fixing computers.

For a time before I moved here I belonged to a computer group, and gained a lot of knowledge from those members as well.     So I consider myself fortunate that I am able to have this programme set up without having any problems.

We went through the basic cropping, colouring exercises before getting down to some creative stuff 

 I achieved a couple of results I like with very simple colour manipulation. 

Then we went on with some more really clever stuff. (well to me is is brilliantly clever)

Misty and Nana

Brad, me and Nath

I made two nice photos of me with grandchildren.

Then we went onto cutting and pasting.   Something I learned from this was that I can do it better, but these are the lesson photographs.

Dad on a fishing trip

With the photo above of my Dad I took a pic of one of my reef paintings and was able to copy and past the photo of Dad plus cut out bits around his picture as well.   (Great clapping of hands when I did this)

Mum as a little girl

The little girl is my mother dressed in her finery.  It was an old black and white photo which I was able to use the lasso tool to remove her image (a huge feat with my shaky hands) and impost it onto a piece of my embroidery.  

I did have problems with the photo could not get it to colour and that is when I discovered  what my problems were ....(a) I was not focusing on what I was reading (b) I was not reading every line, but glossing over bits which always turned out to be the important bits. Changed the old photo to RGB and it worked.  (more great clapping of hands for myself)

Then we got to frames and gradients and I really realised the importance of "layers".  We made some notepaper, andhere I made a collage of the four pages I did.

collage of my notepaper pages

The final part of the lesson was a challenge to go through the various elements, take some pictures and work with them and design a quilt.  Not being a quilter my efforts at that were not good, but I worked on the principal of working with shapes.   Although I am convinced that damn lasso is like fly paper ....sticks to the curser and wont go away until you click on something else.

Here my quilt designs......not perfect but I still gave myself lots of clapping of hands. Learned a lot about "layers" with this and also that you must name each layer as you go. 

My earlier efforts with this programme are on my other blog here