he4rty: that's lovely! the rays look great, what did you use to make them? the exploding text is a cool detail too.
hanciong: i like the grungy feeling of that wallpaper.

I found what seemed to be a single wide pixel brush about 512 px long, So I set up a 4*4 grid and brush in a straight line from corner to corner in both directions of the smaller square., the brush dynamics was set to simple so the brush rotated, I also sent the brush spacing to the maximum 220. The image creted was a white brush on a black background, then I did a motion blur on the image using the radial blur direction outwards and length about 128. Finally I created a new layer that I filled with a colour blend and set mode of layer to colour.

Since I just broke a comp, when I got the replacement I thought it would be funny to do this.

Currently on my laptop I use An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump by Joseph Wright of Derby (1768). I really love the techniques used in this image, it's certainly a level of expression and style to aspire towards.


On my desktop I currently use my Christmas card from 2010, Good neighbours:


And on my work machine I use my Not looking at the water:

.
Griatch

he4rty: aha, a long brush! i've never thought of making rays that way before, but it makes sense. thank you!
ek22: that's funny ! did you use gimptricks tutorial?
griatch: i really like "not looking at the water". you can almost feel the wind and hear the waves and i think the tilted horizon helps a lot with that.

Griatch - lovely work as usual.
ek22 - love the concept and know the feeling.

Yeah, gimptricks tut and tweaked a little bit. I put a little bit of a shadow under the cracks to offset them from the screen. Iunno, it's been like my itching urge all week to punch technology until it bleeds. This sort of plays into that mindset.

oooh, I would love to know how to make that rainbow ubuntu nova wallpaper!!! Is there a tutorial in the works?

ek22: i think we all know that feeling .

Hello he4rty, thank you for the tutorial . the following is my result. But I don't know the purpose of the 3rd step. why do we have to offset by 49 px? also steps 25-28, are they typo, or you really did it twice? Thanx

I like my backgrounds dark and abstract. I get distracted if there's any stuff in there.

Nice wallpaper. I'm the same as you - I kept the Ubuntu default wallpaper for that very reason.

Brrrr

The reason for the offset was because the squares didn't fit exactly on the width and I just found that by doing the offset it gave a better colour blend to the finished result also steps 25 - 28 are not typo's it was just easier to repeat the steps twice rather than duplicate the layer about 25 times.

Nice results by the way and lovely colours.

One more question. It seems your wallpaper use "ubuntu color pallette". I mean it only consists orange, purple, and grey, if I am not mistaken. from where do you get it? Thanx

The pallette was one which I created myself for the design and can be download from here along with all the other pallettes I have created, the first 12 pallettes which have 36 colours were all created with the cubism image in mind.

Pallette Pack

New wallpaper.

dd: that one is really cool, nice job! it looks a lot like spilled oil.

real nice colors dd, did you make that with gimp

Yep, all I used was iwarp, solid noise, plasma and layer modes. Oh, maybe a bit of airbrush on one layer.