In this tutorial we will learn how to create a simple but nice sun rise scene. the end result could useful for a website header or even a postcard.
The techniques I’m going to use are quite simple, a few gradients colours, blend modes and some nice floral and grass brushes applied using GIMP’s 2.6 dynamic brushes feature.
Preparing you’re GIMP
Before we start I would like to make sure you have GIMP 2.6 as, If you don’t, check out gimpusers.com download page for the latest version.
Installing Brushes
We’re going to be using two types of brushes the floral brushes by gvalkyrie and the grass brushes by Archeleron. both were made for photoshop but as I’ve mentioned before GIMP fully supports PS brushes.
After downloading them be sure to place in your GIMP’s brushes folder.. for Win vista users, place the brushes in “C:\Users\Account_name\.gimp-2.6\brushes” should do the trick if you don’t know your way around your OS system, the easiest thing is to do a simple search for the brushes folder and it should come up. Also make sure you actually paste the .abr file and not the folder.
Step 1
Create a new image, depending on what you’re going to use yours for you might want to decide now otherwise just enter 617x200px to follow my tutorial.
Step 2
We’ll start with the background. first create a new layer and from the toolbox grab the Gradient blend tool.
Once you have the tool selected go to your colour boxs and enter ff6c00 as your foreground colour and ffc662 for the background.
Step 3
Now that you have your colours set create a new layer and apply it so that the dark orang starts from the top and the light orange is at the bottom. Pressing the CTRL key while applying will give you a perfect straight blend.
Step 4
Create a new layer and use the ellipse tool draw a oval shape in the centre of the canvas, then go to Select>feather 100px and fill the selection with the white using the paint bucket.
Once you have drawn and feathered it to 100px, Set the layer to overlay
Step 5
Repeat step 4 but this time draw a perfect circle go to Select>feather at 50px.
Step 6
Now grab the brush tool from the toolbox, then select “Circle Fuzzy (17)” from the brushes dialog and scale the size to 7.
Step 7
With the large soft brush in hand apply a few stokes across the bottom of the image just a few pixels wide.
Step 8
Time to apply some of the grass brushes we installed in the beginning of this tutorial. first select the 2nd grass from the view list, set the scale size to 0.20 and tick the random box in dynamic brushes.
Once you have that set up, apply it to the bottom of the image as shown in my example.
Step 9
Now that we have our bottom filled with grass we can go ahead an randomly mix the other grass brushes so it doesn’t look to cloned.
Step 10
For our final step, we’ll add the floral vines brushes to our scene but first hit the reset button found at the bottom the brushes dialog.
Now we can go ahead and apply some of those floral brushes to the sides of our image.
Pretty simple tutorial but the results are quite nice.
You may want to add you blog header or text to the middle of the image while trying to keep the text inside the white area.
Here is my final result.
