Hiya guys! Christmas is coming next month and people have started shopping early already! Well, I thought why not get ready myself? After all who would want to rush during the Christmas time? So I will be redesigning the blog especially for Christmas and the first thing would be the banner. I know this banner is awesome but it does not have the Christmas feel to it. So I changed it a little and I came up with a great Christmas banner. Here's how the banner will look like after finishing:
Start with the basic logo or banner you have. In our case it will be our present banner.
After you open up the banner, create a new layer. Select the new layer as transparent and select a Snowflake brush of your choice. Now you will have to scale down the brush from the options in the toolbox till they are of the size you want. Select foreground color as white and then draw snowflakes on the new layer. Choose different shapes and sizes. You will get something like this:
After this select the layer and right click on it. Select alpha to selection. You will see marching ants border around your snowflakes. Go to Edit and select Grow. In the dialog box that pops out type in 1 and make sure its in pixels. Then create a new layer and go to your Fill Tool. Select a shade of blue and fill the selection area by clicking in it. Go to Filters > Blur > Motion blur and then apply the effect. The outcome will look like this.
Pull the layer below the one with white snowflakes and you will get a bluish border around the snowflakes and it will look as if its falling due to the Motion Blur.
Next what we want is to have our GIMP to wear a Santa Claus hat. So we use this Santa hat.
Copy this hat and then paste it in our working space. You will see a Floating Layer in the Layers window. Select it and then right click on it and select New Layer. That will turn it into a normal new layer. Scale the hat, Rotate it till you get a acceptable angle and size. Then fit it on the GIMP. After this create snowflakes on a New Transparent Layer with the motion blur like above and keep it above the layer which has the logo to give an effect like that of snow falling in front of the logo.
It is very easy to create something like this. So before firing up your GIMP, you will have to get the snowflake brushes. You can create these brushes yourselves but why bother when it already done by someone? This brush pack has been created by hawksmont and is free to use both for personal as well as commercial uses. Download the brush pack from this direct link. After downloading the zip file, install the brushes and then start GIMP.
After you open up the banner, create a new layer. Select the new layer as transparent and select a Snowflake brush of your choice. Now you will have to scale down the brush from the options in the toolbox till they are of the size you want. Select foreground color as white and then draw snowflakes on the new layer. Choose different shapes and sizes. You will get something like this:
After this select the layer and right click on it. Select alpha to selection. You will see marching ants border around your snowflakes. Go to Edit and select Grow. In the dialog box that pops out type in 1 and make sure its in pixels. Then create a new layer and go to your Fill Tool. Select a shade of blue and fill the selection area by clicking in it. Go to Filters > Blur > Motion blur and then apply the effect. The outcome will look like this.
Pull the layer below the one with white snowflakes and you will get a bluish border around the snowflakes and it will look as if its falling due to the Motion Blur.
Copy this hat and then paste it in our working space. You will see a Floating Layer in the Layers window. Select it and then right click on it and select New Layer. That will turn it into a normal new layer. Scale the hat, Rotate it till you get a acceptable angle and size. Then fit it on the GIMP. After this create snowflakes on a New Transparent Layer with the motion blur like above and keep it above the layer which has the logo to give an effect like that of snow falling in front of the logo.
So here are the start and end images.
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| Starting Image |
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| Completed Image |
Show us what you are doing for Christmas this time. Whether it's shopping, travelling or sitting at home designing banners like me, tell us and share your experiences!
