GFX with GIMP

When I was a kid one of my favorite things to do was to mess around with graphics as well as making montages for video games. The two tools I used primarily were Adobe After Effects and Photoshop. An old throw back to my favorite tutorial channel was videocopilot. If you use After Effects I HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend this guys tutorials. I am in no way affiliated with him, I have just spent countless hours following his guides and feel his stuff is top tier! (Twitch Plug-in will always be #1 in my heart! Caveat: It has nothing to do with streaming!!)

Now that I am older and have responsibilities I was looking for a way to get back into these hobbies without the same price tag. That is when I stumbled upon the open source equivalents of these tools.

Let me introduce you to my friend GIMP. Named after the status of my wallet, atleast I assume..

In GIMP: File --> New --> 640 width, 400 Height

Use the Rectangle Select Tool to create a button the size that you want.

We can use the Tool Menu on the left to round, feather, and a few other options if we want.

Once we have the button shaped how we want, we save the selections to channel: Select --> Save to Channel

Once saved to channel you should notice a new set of options within the right pane.

From here we navigate to the Layers menu.

Create a new layer.

Now to begin working on this button. First we fill in the image with whatever we are wanting to use. The guide I am following along with is using a solid color, I am going to atleast attempt to add an image.

Fill in the button with a background color using the bucket fill tool.

Create another layer.

Next feather our selection we can do so from Select --> Feather

With the new layer we created

With the new layer we created we fill it in with the button color we want. In this case we will use red. If you feather this right it'll do this...

Mine looks like this

If you remove visibility, you can see that it is feathered tho

Will come back to this. Unable to get Bevel working properly.