Finally -- Tapered lines in GIMP! How to make them (in 2.7). (Shallow Thoughts)

Akkana's Musings on Open Source Computing and Technology, Science, and Nature.

Sun, 14 Mar 2010

Finally -- Tapered lines in GIMP! How to make them (in 2.7).

[grass brush example] So many times I've wanted a way to make tapered lines in GIMP. It doesn't come up that often, but when it does, it's frustrating that it's so difficult.

For instance, when I was working on the animated brush section of Beginning GIMP, I wanted to make a brush that looked like grass, because that's something I've found quite difficult to do by hand in GIMP. But to make each blade of grass, I ended up drawing a green line of fixed width, zoom way in, then using the lasso selection tool to select and clear the edges of the end of each stroke. What a pain!

[tapered lines in GIMP] Imagine my excitement when I saw GIMP developer Alexia Death talking about how she'd added taper to GIMP's Paint Dynamics in the development version of GIMP. I had to try it.

But I needed some help figuring out how to do it, and I know I'll forget; so I wrote up a tutorial, both for myself and to help anyone else who needs tapered lines.

Alas, this feature is brand new and only works in recent development builds. But if you aren't that current with GIMP, it's something to look forward to. I'll keep this tutorial updated in case methods change.

GIMP Tutorial: Tapered lines

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[ 20:26 Mar 14, 2010    More gimp | permalink to this entry | ]

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