Looks great Akros, you've completed my 'GC Gold Star Challenge' with much success.
Congratulations!

*Sips beer, kicks a rock*

Yup...

What do you mean Ek22?

Must learn how to use GFIG~note to one
self

Me too... I haven't used Gfig all that much, but I did manage to create a nice 5 pointed star with it.

I'm going to get on it today when I get back from my ex servicewomens meeting.

Good luck.

(click for DA page)

I'm a bit late to the party, but the original challenge was to make a star quickly without any measuring. Despite all the advanced GIMP usage displayed here I don't think anyone showed a freehand gold-star in this thread yet. So here's a quick sketchy one. It could be made a lot better (notably the highlights could be enhanced to make it more "metallic") but this is a swift one as requested.
.
Griatch

Nice freehand sketch Griatch.

Man - I just LOVE how creative the folks are here for coming up with a solution!

Here is my (insanely) easy way to make a star....

This is in 2.6 (all I have on the machine I'm at right now) but should also work in 2.8

Just create a new brush with the settings I show below. If you set the hardness to 100 it will make a solid star, and if you set the hardness to 0 then do a magic wand select on the white BG with 0 tolerance, invert the selection and run a Filter->Distorts->Emboss you end up with a nice greyscale beveled star. The only limit in 2.6 is brushes can only be 1000px.


-Rob A>

You're right, that is "insanely easy" to do.
Great example RobA, thanks for posting it. Here's the star I made using this technique.

Very nice RobA, that looks easy enough, even for me.

I agree, you should try it Molly. As RobA said "it's insanely easy".

Griatch - Nice star.
RobA - Thanks for the technique

Using Robs brush i just created a bumpmap and using the G'MIC smoothing got this in 4 minutes.

Already have the brush - 20 seconds



Star brush
create a new colored layer
bump map the star to that colored layer



use the wand to select the star on the star brush layer
select the colored layer
select invert -select feather - delete

done

Brush attached. Not the same as Robs though.


my brush looks like this

Here is my go at the original challenge using the brush technique plus about 6 layers of various gradient blends, and edge detect for highlights and a colour maps applied against the embossed layer, and a small gradient edge stroke:

About 15 minutes work.

-Rob A>

Super quick Rod! Very cool too.

Excellent work RobA, the star looks fabulous.
Seems as though this wasn't much of a challenge for you then.

I wouldn't say that! I started by constructing paths, and rotating them, etc.... which was a pain in the posterior. Then I thought - I'll leverage polar maps...(like someone else did as well! Great minds think alike....) and found I couldn't get the lines of the star straight.... and gave up!

Then I was doing something else creating a hexagon brush for a map and it came to me in a head slap!

It's only not a challenge once you know an easy technique

For me the hard part initially was making the star geometry (until I lucked into using a brush). Doing metallic gradients, etc is something I've done for ages (inkscape and Gimp) mainly for making metallic objects for my mapping...

-Rob A>

you are clearly the winner of this challenge !

great work, RobA !