Snow Brush

This has to be the easiest tutorial I’ve ever made. Instead of using Noise and Motion Blur to make snow, why not just make your own snow brush? Here’s how I did it.

Step 1.
Open a new image 5 pixels wide x 15 pixels high. Zoom in to 1600% to make it easier to see what we are going to be doing.

Step 2.
Fill the Background layer with your black FG color, then create a new layer above it named “Snow”.



Step 3.
Use the Rectangle Select tool to create a selection from top to bottom of your image that is only 1 pixel wide. Move it to the exact center if you need to.



Step 4.
Select the Blend Tool and set the gradient to FG to transparent. Now reverse your FG/BG colors so that white is the FG color. Check the little box next to the Gradient to reverse it so that the transparency is on the left and the white is on the right. Stroke the selection from top to bottom using the control key to get it perfectly straight.



Step 5.
Turn off the selection (Select>None) and delete the black background layer and you’re brush is finished.



Save it as a .gih brush and place your new brush in your Gimp “User” Brushes folder, then refresh your brushes.

Step 6.
Open a new image, say 500 x 500 or something and give it a dark color. I like Blue so
we’ll go with 000050. Select your Paintbrush Tool and navigate to your new Snow brush and set the size to 4. This will make a good sized snowdrop to experiment with.

In the tool dialog, check the box for Apply Jitter and set the Amout to 10. Now, stroke straight across your image horizontally to paint in some snow. Here’s what we get.



Go to Edit>Undo Paintbrush and then change the Jitter amount to 30 and stroke your image again and see what happens.



Go to Edit>Undo Paintbrush again and this time set the size to 2 and the jitter to 5 then try your brush again.



Now our snowdrops are much smaller, but we have a lot of blank space. Do the Undo thing again and this time set the Jitter to about 40 and try again.



By simply adjusting the size and the Jitter, you can make some really believable snow effects. If it looks too sparse to you still, rather than stroking the whole image (poor results and too many overlaps) just make some short strokes in the blank areas to help fill in where you think it needs it.

With just a little practice and just a few strokes, you’ll be making snow like a pro and saving some time as well. Now let's take a look at a really simple image to illustrate how to use the snow brush effectively.

In the screenshot below I created a background gradient layer, brought in an image of some snow near the bottom, adjusted the curves to darken it a bit, then created a layer for my snow above the other layers. I used my new Snow brush to paint in some snowfall, tweaked it a bit here and there, adding some snowfall to the blank spaces, then applied a blur of 1 to soften the effect.

Next I scaled the snow layer about 120% then used the Rotate tool to get a -20 degree angle, then Layer to Image size.

Hope I made that clear enough and I didn't confuse anyone.



To make your snow even more realistic, you can add more depth by creating another layer, or maybe even two, and set the Opacity to different amounts.

Here’s the image with two added layers. Wow. It’s really coming down out there now!



I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Now go play in the snow!

draconian: lovely!!!
i love snow, i think snow is the best invention ever, and i love learning new ways to make snow, so right now you're among my favourite people in the world.

Nice tutorial and some good results.

You're easily impressed. You'll get over it as soon as the turkey comes out of the oven if not before.

he4rty - Thanks. I was just puttering around and made a couple of larger brushes (attached) and had trouble making it look right. After some experimentation I decided to make life simple and just do a single snowdrop. Who knew?

It's a nice way to make a brush! Thanks for the mini-tutorial.

To be honest it looks more like rain than snow to me though. Snow don't really form droplets, snow flakes have much higher buoyancy in air and don't fall straight down like this.
It could by all means be slush rain though.
.
Griatch

Technically speaking you are right of course. To be honest, I never gave it much thought. Your particular expertise in your most excellent paintings gives you a distinct advantage over most of us having rendered many different types of subject matter. In retrospect I have to agree with you, it does look more like rain. I guess snow would possibly be better represented by various sizes of blurred dots to simulate flakes. My intent was to give it a sense of movement like driven snow in a blizzard but without using any animation. More of a feel thing than an accurate representation I guess. Perhaps the 'tails' or the length of the 'snowdrops' is the worst offender here.

Here's the real test....when you look at it, does it make you feel cold and want to bundle up, or does your trained eye merely notice the inconsistency like 'what's wrong with this picture'?

I guess I can live with "slushy rain". Now I gotta make some 'flakes' and see what that looks like.

Thanks for the comments...made me stop and think. (am I the only one, or is there something burning?)

I didn't think it looked like any snow I have ever seen either Drac. You can get real wet snow and the flakes are quite large but they are still round or look round from a distance. You can get a hard driven sleet with snow mixed and they would be slanted but they still wouldn't look like that.
Anyway, you did a great job on the tutorial so maybe you could just change the shape and everything else would be the same.

Maybe I should just pull a Rita Radner and be done with it. (Saturday Night Live)

"NEVERMIND"

draconian: it's not realistic looking snow, but i thought it had a really nice snow feeling. i made some sweet naivistic snowy pictures with my snow brush and whatever snow looks like this is definitely what it feels like ! and it also works very well as falling snow seen through a car windscreen on a dark evening.

They look like heavy rain though, or if you somehow got them to be radial, maybe fireworks sparks. Just because it ain't snow, don't mean it ain't 'something'.

Thanks for the brushes Draconian, I was just looking for some. I found some trees but needed some fresh snow for
my Angry Bird Tux to slide on

They would make really good shooting stars too. In fact they have a lot of possibilities.

exactly what i thought
shooting stars, particles hitting an energy shield, a propulsion effect, sunrays, etc.

thanks for another interesting tutorial, Drac !

My first thought was a meteor shower but I love it

With a bit of snow.

There was mention of shooting stars. Which is basically rocks snowing from outer space.

I used this brush for the meteors. Works really well.

Well, perhaps all is not lost after all. Thanks for all the comments everyone. Maybe I should go back and revise the tut to say "Making Rain and Snow". I could show the same use of Jitter and Opacity in brush dynamics, only using the fuzzy brush for snow and the one I made in the tut for rain.



BTW...I was not offended by any of the comments. I really was glad Griatch made the observation.

EK22 - That looks pretty cool. Maybe a much longer tail and a brighter tip for shooting stars?

Very good Drac, that snow looks very very real to me.

Thanks Molly. After reading all the comments I realized I just got in a hurry. A plain ol' fuzzy brush does a much better job.

Drac, you could always come up North when we get our next snow storm and sit in the window and watch. I guess you don't get too much snow in Texas.