Tutorial: Get to know GIMP better

This the a tutorial where you will familiarize yourself with the GIMP. After firing up the GIMP, you will see a layout like the screen shot I have pasted here. I have marked different portions of the scree in different colors and labelled them for your ease. The red portion of the GIMP is you main work area where you will see all the magic happening. The green portion is your toolbox and it contains all the tools like the "blend tool", "path tool", etc. The blue layer is your layers, channels and paths box. Over here all the various layers show up as you continue your work. The brushes are also here.
The best thing about all of these are that you can re-size any of these panels to fit your screen. I have kept mine such that the main working panel takes up the maximum space and the other two panels have just enough width to show all their options.
Let me tell you a secret in this GIMP tutorial, as soon as you download and install GIMP, go and download GIMP Paint Studio (GPS) along with it and install it. The link to downloading GPS is code.google.com/p/gps-gimp-paint-studio/. Installing GPS will give you a larger variety of brushes and fonts to work with. You can download more fonts and install them from DaFont. They have an excellent collection of free fonts and you will get a font for all your needs. I downloaded an awesome font called "Where the Star Shines on" from there and make the banner for this blog. Though it took a little more than just a font to make it like that, however once you start on GIMP tutorials, the fun never ends.

The Banner

Here's the banner! So did you like the banner? Leave a comment below if you this this can be made even better and tell us how. Leave a link to your own banner design and if I like any of those very much, I will ask you to do a Guest post for this GIMP Tutorials!

Posted in: beginners tutorials, GIMP tutorials, Gimp tutorials for beginners, online GIMP tutorials