im not sure whats happening here, but if you select the wolf layer you obviously cant erase the leaf layer, because you have to select the layer you want to erase from

it could be you locked the alpha channel by accident or the brush is so small you dont see any effects ?
1px brush sounds very small

but to be honest, what you are trying to do is not exactly a beginners project, i recommend watching a few tutorials by 'GIMPtricks' on youtube, to get a grip of the most basic things in Gimp

for example, in this tutorial you can see the feathered selection technique, molly explained to you

Thanks again Molly ^_^, indeed "Select -> None" did the trick

And PhotoComix, thanks for the suggestion! I indeed lassoed a leaf from the other side, and put in between the leaf-frame and the wolf, to cover his neck more

And thank both ^_^, making the wolf bigger indeed looks better

check it out:


Now, a question; when I re-scaled the layers down, did I permanently lose resolution? If now I re-scale all layers back up to original leaf-frame size will it still be poor resolution, or the image is the same and GIMP is smart ?

PC could answer that one better than me.

PC, if later you could shed some light into the workings of GIMP, I'm curious

In the meanwhile, I re-made it from scratch, keeping the highest resolution from the beggining so I wouldn't have to up-scale in the end, and here is the end result:
(I'm pretty happy ^_^)


PS: is there any work-around way to attach a xcf file here?

Just zip it, that works.

You will lose some image quality by scaling down then back up. GIMP is not smart (it does whatever you tell it to do, what could be stupider than that ). You should generally work with an image canvas of the size you ultimately want, scaling the wolf and leaves to match (if necessary).

That being said, you may wish to ignore the general rule and scale the leaves down to match the wolf and then scale them both back up to size. The reason for this? If you are scaling the wolf and not the leaves, the end result may be that the two elements have dramatically different qualities producing an obvious photoshopped look. It might be preferable to have the leaves and the wolf rendered to the same relative quality, even though the leaves' quality may be lower than possible (at least they will match).

I see you already got a reply from Saulgoode

No much to add, scale (up and down) always damage quality ...luckily "damage quality" is a tecnichal descrition but there are cases where the "damage" is nice from a artistic point of view

Anyway the best is do as moderate possible , note that scaling down is less problematic (IF you have not to scale up after ! ) then scaling up

Anyway till you use xcf to save(or even png if a single layer ) quality loss is more limited, it is much more evident if image are saved as jpg because save as jpg ALWAYS create a quality loss
(in the smarter way possible but become very evident if you will try to edit the jpg )

Yes your last looks MUCH better ...doesn't look anymore as beheaded