This page was made just to illustrate some basic shading. You probably already know about this stuff if you have used GIMP for a while.

Most of this stuff applies to version 1.1.x.

The original image

This is the image before the hell broke loose. =)

Shading with gradients

This technique is very simple. Just use radial gradients for shading. The downside is that the gradient looks kind of artificial if you're just painting stuff. But... err, it looks nice, doesn't it?

This shows the relevant part of the layer dialog after our grand work has been done. Note where the gradient is. You guessed where that gradient goes.[1]

Shading using airbrush

This was made with XInput Airbrush and Convolver tools. I just sprayed black color to the dark parts, some white to the white parts (hmmm, in retrospect, maybe that was a mistake - the area that was supposed to be whiter looks darker!) and kon-wolfed the stuff.

Dodge and burn, baby!

This was made with the Dodge/Burn tool, with kind of a big brush. Took no time. Wonderful tool. It will work even better if you have some more patience ... and a better image to work with =)

Lighting Effects

OK, this is the Monster. It might make cool stuff, but believe me, it's hairy thing to work with. (I hope PhotoShop's Lighting plugin is not as clunky. =) I'd rather work with something else. (Oh, BTW, the title image was shaded with this plugin too...)

Footnotes

[1] A friend of mine (the only person in the whole world who's more absent-minded than I am) once showed the demos he had made (With Turbo Pascal 6.0 for DOS... ahh, nostalgy) to people. Well, umm, his hacks seemed to have one distinct feature. When he showed the advertisement for his BBS, and when the text stopped appearing and the whole picture started moving around with certain pattern, another friend of mine shouted: "...annnnd a sine curve!" ... Well, take a look at my GIMPwork. I bet you can shout "...annnnd a bump-map!" or "...annnnd a layer mask trick!" the same way =)

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Last modified: Wed Nov 17 01:27:24 EET 1999