gradient or plain white canvas + Gimpressionist.
Nothing more, nothing less.

the first snowflake one

The squares and the circles for me, certainly some interesting results.

the possibility of creating this kind of patterns/backgrounds with GIMPressionist is virtually limitless, considering the fact that GIMP allows you to create your own brushes for gimpressionist (saving as ppm and pgm file formats) and presets.

the blocks and circles remind me of the hockney effect!

Here's one more resembling Hockney effect

adding transparency gradient

redcurrant

Thanks for sharing this! I had no idea it was possible to do this.
I wonder if it is possible to make a design using this technique as the following link:
http://www.pickywallpapers.com/3d/abstr ... es-picture

Is there a tutorial about how to do this?

Hi, YAFU. With just Gimpressionist - I'm afraid it's not possible. That beautiful glowing fill would be the hardest part. Frames are possible to create, all it takes is adding a new brush to it.
PGM brushes in Gimpressionist act like layer masks. Black -full transparency, white -full opacity, everything in between - some level of transparency. I'm gonna try to create such a brush later on today.

No, there is no tutorial as far as I know. I discovered this accidentally playing with gimpressionist about a year ago but I thought a lot of people knew this stuff.
Create new image, fill it with gradient (optional). In Gimpressionist presets choose Ballpark (make sure sphere is a current brush) - Apply. Click on Update. Don't hit OK yet. Pick any other brush, click Update. You can change brush sizes and variance, density, aspect, bg color etc. This is pretty much it!

Gimpressionist is really fun and you can get unlimited effects...but it is very hard to learn what is going to happen, it's more like a trial and error kind of filter for me!

It certainly was a trial and error for me at first, but when I figured out how it worked, the final result is 100% predictable.

Thank you very much!
I'll try that.

You're welcome, YAFU!

Loving the redcurrant design.

I prefer to render with rice. lol

Click here for details. I did blend a hint of G'MIC to add just a touch of shineyness to the grain.

k1tesseraena: cool idea! this has to be tried.
lylejk: that's fun! is it you tithonia again?

My Tithonia plant toppled over; trying to save it but don't believe I will be successful. It was over 8 feet tall; almost as tall as our red maple tree. Sad that this happened, but we did have strong winds last night. Oh well. As for the rice render, I had fun then, but picked up a few tricks since then to make it look more like real rice (my mind's eye of course).

With a few additional steps, you can do lite-brite renders too.

http://www.gimptalk.com/index.php?/topi ... ntry310253

Wow. I love all of those, K1TesseraEna! The bottom one could be a pile of blueberries if colored differently.