Okay, so since not alot of people use GIMP, or maybe most of you do but you don't have the slightest idea as to what to do, I thought I'd post a few segments on tips I think that would help you build better and more creative signatures. If you have anything you want to submit to this guide, go ahead and post and I'll check on it. 
- First you have to choose which kind of signature you want. Do you want it to have a grungey or fractal background? Or would you want a vectored signature. Do you want a render in it or not? And how do you want the text to look? These are the first things you should ask yourself before working on building a signature.
- If you're using a 3D gaming render or something else, I would stick to using a grunge-esque style. I wouldn't recommend using anime or cartoon renders because they don't suit grunge style. Use cartoon/anime for vector-style backgrounds.
- If no other render you can possibly find suits you, then I would resort to using a custom render. Use the selection path tool to cut around the render. Or alternatively use the magic wand and create an area of transparency around the render so you can use it in a signature.
- Sometimes the render you'll use won't seem to fit the signature. Even though you have everything right, the lighting could be wayyyy off. Play around with the brightness and contrast until you can figure some way to make it look better. Or alternatively duplicate the render, gaussian blur it by some amount and set the blurred layer to a soft light so it looks better.
- Make sure before using a render in a signature you get any grey or other coloured lines out of it. They'll get annoying, so I would use a fuzzy circle brush and erase away at it.
- Getting the colour on a background takes work. You can either a) use your brushes first, then colourize or b) set a gradient, set your brush to overlay and work the brushes over the gradient. The thing about the colour is you have to find a way to make the colours match the render. Don't just pick a colour because you like it. That's not gonna make it look good.
Alternatively c) randomly displace your render all over the background and smudge it around till you get a decent colour.
- Don't be afraid to play around with the smudge tool.
 Just remember GIMP can undo alot. 
- Filters also play an important role. Sometimes you can use them to get an awesome effect on your background, or maybe just as little as improving the lighting on your signature. Play around, be creative, explore each filter and see what you can do.
- Brushes can play an important role. Depending on the brushes it can either make your signature look horrible, or look very good. Be careful which brushes you use with your signatures.
- Creating brushes can also turn out better than what you think. You can turn ordinary every day pictures into something that you can imply into your signature. You can use things like pictures of fires into flamey brushes, or you can use the clouds in a picture and turn it into a cloud brush. Step is to turn it to greyscale mode, save it as .gbr, and move it to your GIMP brush folder. Be creative in what you use, just be careful as to how you light them.
- When you're all done, render is well placed, background looks nice, merge all them and be sure to smudge around the render. That way it doesn't look like it has a complete line around it. You want it to look well placed in it, not something done in 3 minutes.
- Sometimes when you least expect it, you can make it look even better. Using a black and white gradient you can change the lighting so it looks like something from light to dark. Simply create a new layer over your signature, set it to maybe soft light or overlay, and look at what kind of impact it had.
- Text I would know is a major epic with everyone here. Colour I wouldn't even pick out from the custom colours. Heck, every time I build a signature I never even change the colours on the swatches. Here are a few tips for text. 1) Make sure you find a suitable font, you don't want to have to use things like Arial or Times New Roman right? 2) The colours I wouldn't have to worry about. Usually I create up to 7 to 8 different layers of the text and I change the layers differently using layer modes and filters. 3) Before you even work on text, merge it to a layer that's actually the size of the signature. When working with the text right in the box, using filters I found the size to be limited. Be sure to merge it with the proper sizing layer beforehand. 4) If all else fails, you can always duplicate and smudge and play with the layer modes. That's what I sometimes do.
- I know you all might disagree with me on this but, .jpg is just as good as .png. JPG is more common for file types, and .png's only difference is that it can save transparencies. JPG is just as good as .PNG in quality, you just have to adjust JPG's quality when saving.
That just about wraps it up for now. Any more tips you think I should put in here feel free to post. I want to make this as excellent as possible so all are free to learn from this.
|
