Another Topiary. This time I used my knew Toy (thanks David/Rod) along with some annisotropic smoothing, b/w Stamp, and Skeleton to create the trace guides that I used to stroke with the GIMP default Vine brush.

ref: http://www.morguefile.com/archive/display/90281

That is so cool. Nice work, Lyle.

Neat effect!

Lyle that is a great image.This needs to be a tutorial in the tutorial area i think.
How long did it take to render with the vine brush?

The overall render took probably between 8 to 15 (never really note the time) Rod. The slowest part, of course, is Rodilius (wish I had a faster PC; lol) and the second slowest (but not really that slow) was the Skeleton step. Once I got that, I just copied it, set Quick mask and pasted into and de-selected Quick mask (note, disable selection view; trust me) and stroked the select with the leaves and also added vine bark on another stroke at a lower layer (can't really see the vine bark though; lol).

Very cool. The small patches of brick wall are really critical here in order to understand that it's really wines that we are seeing. Only thing I wish would be to combine this with some other photomanipulation in order to make a more complete composition. Imagine for example the wall of a house, or several houses with wines - and then suddenly among them is this! Would really make people look twice methink!
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Griatch

How did you do that? thats look fab:D

Way too lazy to do any more work then I have to Griatch. lol

Thanks Lorri. The trick is to define your selection paths. Then, it's just a matter of stroking the path of your selection with the brush of choice Lorri. Both Stroke Path and Stroke Selection (I usually do stroke selection but I also sometimes do this on paths too and paths arguably is the better way, but selections work for me) are located under the Menu drop option Lorri.

Can you do a tut on it please. I wouldn't mind have a go at that meself

Sorry Lorri; way too lazy for a detailed tut, but will do a short tut on how I created the outline target. It's then a matter of using the outline target as a selection (copy, toggle quick mask and paste w/ anchor then untoggle) afterwhich all you have to do is stroke with the brush of choice (in the Topiary case, I used the default GIMP Vine brush scaled to around 50% and set the spacing of the brush to 120).

Step one (rough extraction; accuracy not 100% necessary):



Step two (lylejk stencil; helps with Rodilius step):



Step three (Rodilius):

Step 4 (Anisotrophic Step):



Step 5 (ACE; helps define outline better):



Step 6 (Black and White Stamp):

Step 7 (Skeleton; this is your stroke template):

thanks lylejk, very instructive!

That is so cool.