Fresh Gradients - The Tutorial

In this tutorial i will show you how i made the gradients from my last two posts.

Creating new complex gradients in Gimp is hard work. The FG-BG gradient option works great, but if you want more colours, be prepared to invest some time.

Here is an easier way of getting gradients made of more than two colours, and there are a few possibilities that you cant do with the gradient tool.

01. Type your text. Most of the time i start with my so called Base-Text in the 50ies medium grey (#808080). That colour is great for bumpmapping, thats why i use it in every tutorial.

Alpha select your text and save it to a channel for future use. Its always good to have a backup of your text and it makes working with layermasks easier too.

02. Choose a basecolour for your text, create a new layer in that colour and apply a 'Layermask From Channel'

03. Create a new transparent layer. Chose another colour and set the gradient tool from 'FG to transparent'.

Stroke the gradient tool any way you like. In my example i started at the bottom and ended in the middle of the text.

04. Go to your saved channel, turn it on by clicking on the eye and then double click it. A window pops up.

Here you can edit the channel's attributes. Change the fill opacity to 100%. You can also change the colour of the channel if you dont want black.

05. Now everything outside the text boundaries is covered by the channel.

Call up the Move Tool and drag the gradient layer around until you are happy. Or rotate it with the Rotate tool.

If you are no happy with the way the transparency is distributed, change it with an alpha-curve.

When you are done, apply a layermask 'From Channel.

06. Repeat with more layers !

07. Once you filled top and bottom, you can use paintstrokes.

I used a size 10, Hardness 025 brush.

Then blur that line – i used a value of 14px.

Position and then apply the layermask.

08. You can duplicate those line, change colour with the Hue/Brightnes/Saturation Tool and do your usual alpha-curve magic.

Etc.

To finalize my piece i added a stroke, an inner shadow,

then a bevel on top and applied chrome-curves, like i already showed you in some other tutorial. Also added a different background.
And thats it, hope you found it useful.