Teaching Yourself Graphic Design Part 2

The next step is to get ahold of tools for graphic design.  In my post Graphics in Presentation Software, I demonstrate how to use Microsoft Powerpoint to create a graphic.  Microsoft Powerpoint has increased a lot in capability for image manipulation and drawing in recent years, and its wide availability means that it's easy to edit files on multiple computers.  However, it's still quite limited as a graphic design tool.

For my training, I will recommend that you download GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP).  GIMP is free and open source, and it's closest competitor is Adobe Photoshop.  Photoshop is the tool of choice for most graphic artists, but it is expensive and has a steep initial learning curve.

To get a copy of GIMP, visit http://www.gimp.org/downloads/ and click on your operating system.  Once you have installed it, open it up.  It may take some time to load.  Go to the Windows menu and make sure Single-Window Mode is checked if that is an option for your copy.  This will make sure that all your tools are in the same place.

To start drawing with GIMP, go to File > New....  You'll see a pop-up menu with 640 x 480 as the width and height.  Click OK.  You should now see something like the following:

The white square in the center is your drawing canvas, 640 pixels wide by 480 pixels tall.  Click on the paintbrush in the upper left.  You should now see a brush when you hover your mouse pointer over the white canvas.  You can draw freely and use the pink eraser to erase.  Pressing on the black and white squares under the brush and eraser and other tools will bring up a color changer that allows you to change their colors.  Great.  This is exactly like Microsoft Paint so far.  Pretty easy.

After scribbling around for a while, I have the following:

It's not very interesting.  However, I have clicked on the yellow back arrow tab in the upper right-hand corner, revealing a vertical list of images.  Each separate stage in my scribbling (meaning a session of point, click, drag, unclick) is recorded here as an image.  If I click on a previous stage, I can quickly go back to that previous stage.  This "undo stack" is pretty handy if you make a mistake.  But you have to be careful:  if you modify a previous step, all the following steps will disappear.

You should be able to try out the various tools now and undo their functions to your heart's content. When you want to save your artwork, click File > Save.  You will notice the resulting file has an extension of .xcf.  This file is unique to GIMP.  In later tutorials, you will see that .xcf files retain more information about how you made the artwork so you can easily change things later.

To save your artwork in a more traditional form, choose File > Export and save with a .png or .jpg extension.  A .png file is larger but may have better quality; a .jpg file is more economical for emailing the file.  You should have also saved it as a .xcf so you can make changes later.

Enjoy playing around with GIMP and trying things out!  I'll be back with more lessons later.

Side Note:  You'll see that GIMP isn't as good for drawing shapes (vector images).  For doing that, you'll want a separate program.  Another free and open source program for shapes is Inkscape (https://inkscape.org).  Feel free to try out that one as well.