Life Behind A Lens

This Gimp tutorial will show you how to create outlined text like in the example below the tutorial:

This is a fairly simple procedure and one that I’ve used on a number of my t-shirt designs.

So, here we go (I’m going to assume that you know how to use the text tool to write text on your image and how to move it around to where you want it):

Preliminary steps

• Make sure that you have your text written using the text tool, placed where you want it and coloured in the colour that you like.
• Ensure that you have the colour(s) that you’d like to use for your outline(s) selected as the foreground and background colours (in the toolbox panel)

Outlining your text

• Once you have your text placed where you want it, Right Click the layer in the layers, channels, paths tool panel (default is to the right of your image window) and click duplicate layer (normally 5th down from the top)
• Name your new layer Outline 1
• Right Click on your new layer and select Alpha to Selection (third up from bottom) You should now see your text marked as a selection.
• Go to your image window and choose select->Grow A new dialogue box will appear.
• In the dialogue box, choose the size of the increase that you’d like to grow your text by (It’s normally best to leave the unit of measurement as pixels).

Note: This will depend on how large the text is to start with and the effect that you want to generate. Experiment a little until you get it the way you like it by simply using Gimps fantastic undo tool. Edit->Undo

• Once you have selected a growth size, you should see the selection mask has got bigger around your text.
• Now, go to Edit->Fill with FG colour or Edit->Fill with BG colour (depending on which colour you want directly behind the text).
• You should now have larger text filled with the colour that you have just selected.
• Now we need to make your original text visible again. To do this, simply move your Outline 1 layer underneath your original text layer (Simply drag & drop) in the layers, channels, paths tool panel.
• You should now have your original text outlined.

Adding a second outline colour

• This is exactly the same as the steps above except this time you need to start with your Outline 1 layer.and make that one grow.

Note: Name this latest layer Outline 2 _to make them easier to identify.

You can repeat this effect as many times as you like.. Well, until you fill your image up with layered text, anyway!

Important!!! You need to ensure that your original text box in the image is large enough to cater for the growth of the text. If it isn’t, when you duplicate the text layer and grow it, you will end up with parts of the outline missing

That’s about it for this How To Have fun with your text!!

Example of Outlined Text

One of the things that I've noticed on my travels of Redbubble is the difficulty that some folk have formatting their t-shirt designs to the right size and make the background transparent. So I thought I'd write the simple method that I've used down to see if that helps..

So, here’s a quick tutorial on how to create a transparent template and how to save it as a PNG file (including dealing with compression) in GIMP.

Here goes then…

Creating a t-shirt template for working on

• To do this, open GIMP and go to File->New.
• In the options window that appears, set the image size to 2400×3200.
• Expand the advanced options and in the Fill With option select Transparency.
• Click OK.
• That’s it, you now have your t-shirt working space ready for your design.

Top Tip: It’s worth saving this empty image as Template.xcf and then you have a blank template for any future t-shirts that you might want to make!

Now you should be busy adding text and images to produce your groundbreaking and magnificent design. So I’m off for a cup of coffee and a smoke while you do that.

I’ll be back when you’re done to explain how to save it so that it looks right when you upload it as a t-shirt. Good luck with the design!

Okey.. I’m back.. How’s that design going? All done? Jolly good..

Saving your design so that it displays correctly

• First things first.. Save your design as an xcf file, in case you want to edit anything later on.. It may well be unnecessary, but better safe than sorry.

Top Tip: Remember to rename it something other than Template.xcf so that you don’t overwrite your blank working image!!

• Next, you want to save it as a PNG file.. So, goto File->Save As
• At the bottom of the dialogue box, expand the Select File Type (By Extension) option and choose PNG Image.
• Name your new image (if you haven’t already)
• Click Save.
• Assuming that you’ve been using layers in your design, you should now get a message window that says PNG Plug-in can’t handle layers
• Check the Merge Visible Layers radio button and click Export.
• Now you’ll have another dialogue box with some more options. The three that should be checked are: Save Background Colour, Save Resolution and Save Colour Values From Transparent Pixels. All the other are best left unchecked, just to keep it simple.
• Now we need to choose the compression level.. I always set my compression level to one. It doesn’t lose any detail that I can see at all and the image size is something like 2% of the same image set to a compression level of zero.

Note: For example, in my t-shirt design A Rampants’ Day Off a compression level of zero left me with a file size of 29.3Mb, but a compression level of one gave me a file size of 404kb

That’s it, all done. You are now ready to upload your groundbreaking and magnificent design to Redbubble!

This How To is for the GIMP image manipulation software (Version 2.6 used) and shows how to quickly and effectively colour parts of an image to produce an effect like:

• Open your desired image in GIMP.
• Press Ctrl+D to duplicate the image. GIMP will name this ‘untitled’
• In the drop down box at the top of the layers, channels, paths toolbox (to the right of your image window by default), make sure that you have your original image selected.
• Right click the background layer and select New Layer. A new selection window will appear.
• Name the layer B&W and ensure that the fill type is selected as Transparent. Click OK
• Select your duplicated image and convert it to greyscale, using whatever methods and techniques that you normally would.
• Press Ctrl+A (select all) and then Ctrl+C (copy).
• Return to your original image and press Ctrl+V (paste) Note: You can close the ‘untitled’ image now as you have finished with it.
• You will see that your original image has now become greyscale and that in the layers, channels, paths box there is now a Floating selection (pasted layer).
• Right click on the floating selection layer and choose Anchor Layer
• Right click on your B&W layer and choose Add Layer Mask
• Select the paintbrush tool from the Toolbox area (to the left of the image window by default).
• Ensure that black is the foreground colour above the tool options area.
• Paint over the areas of the image that you want to be coloured. Make use of the different brush sizes and zoom in on the image as you desire to ensure that you accurately get close to the edges of the area you want to be in colour.
• You can paint the image back to greyscale by making white the foreground colour (or you can use GIMP’s excellent undo history facility (Edit->Undo History).

Have fun with that colouring! :-D