Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
OK, so, we’ve got our sky recoloured and fading into the background; next, we want to have a little village below the sky.
Sources: Village: http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=view&id=1215281 Tree: http://alfoart.com/flash/beanstalk_tutorial/625100_53361668.jpg?http://www.2textured.com/main.php?g2_itemId=281
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTmehu8x2j4
The Village
Bring the village photo into your scene. How? This is where I test if you’ve read part one or not. Same idea: open the village image and drag it into our main scene. You’ll probably have to resize it to about 750 pixels wide, though.
Should you see something like this, don’t panic
If you look at the list of layers, you’ll see that the village layer is sandwiched between the sky and background images. We need the village to be at the top of the list. Simply drag it up above the sky layer.
Click the move icon, and drag the village layer down to the bottom of the image.
We’re going to chop away some excess trees that are behind the village to give us a nice landscape.
Selections
The selection tools are some of the most important tools in GIMP as they allow you to be as detailed as you need to be when selecting an outline. For this, our first big tutorial, we’ll go with a quick and dirty selection.
Click the ‘Free Select Tool’ (shown left) and draw around the treeline keeping only full trees. Draw out the side of the image, and loop back to where you started. Press the Enter key on your keyboard to complete the selection.
You can, of course, go clockwise if you prefer.
Press the Delete key on your keyboard, and anything inside that selection will be removed.
TIP: If you press the Delete key and the selected area shows black, then you’ll have to go to the menu, click Edit > Undo. Right click on the layers thumbnail, and choose ‘Add Alpha Channel’. Now you can press Delete to remove your selection. This extra ‘Add Alpha Channel’ step isn’t always necessary.
You can, if you like, go around the treeline and tweak it with the eraser, but for now we’ll cover it up with a layer mask. You do remember how to create a layer mask, don’t you? Yep, right clicking on the village layer, and choosing to add a white layer mask.
Use the rectangle select tool to select the top half of the village (below left) and, like last time, use a black and white linear gradient to fade the top part of the village.
Remember last time how I spoke about the layer mask as being non-destructive? Well, here’s your chance to try it out. We created a white layer which was completely transparent, so choose a foreground colour of white and click the ‘Paintbrush’ icon (shown left).
TIP: If you need to enlarge/shrink the paintbrush you can use the square bracket keys (that’s [ and ]).
The idea here (shown below right) is to (on the layer mask!) paint white over some of the foreground trees to remove them from the fog effect in the background.
OK, let’s get our whopping great tree inserted and we’ll finish up part two.
I’ll show you another quick way of inserting an image. Click the link above for the tree source. In your browser, right click the image and copy the image to the clipboard. Go to your main image in GIMP, and, in the menu, click Edit > Paste As > New Layer. Voila!
You’ll have to resize the layer to about 600 pixels wide, and move it down to have the tree roots halfway down the grassy part of the village. Clicking resize, and then on the tree, I’m unlinking the width and height numbers as I just want to stretch the tree vertically to about 650 high.
Like we did with the village, it’s time to trim out the excess background, we just want to keep the tree. Time to click the free select tool and get to work.
This time we want to keep what’s inside the selection, so, in the menu, click Select > Invert and press Delete. One tree. But I think I’d like it growing up to the right, so click Layer > Transform > Flip Horizontally. I’d also like it to have a tint of green like the rest of the image, so click Colors > Colorize, and move the ‘Hue’ slider until you get a greenish tint to the tree. Finally, apply a layer mask to the tree layer, and select the top third of the tree and use the blend tool to fade the tree into the clouds.
One last thing, your homework for this lesson: use the Dodge/Burn tool on the village layer to paint a shadow from the tree across the grass.
In the final part of the Beanstalk image we’ll add some pizazz to the image.