i need the help of you Gimp technicians and wizards

from studying PS tutorials, i have learned that metallic highlights on a stroke can look great

im trying to incorporate that in my text effect stuff and sometimes i get it right and sometimes not
i guess one needs the right gradient for the job

tonight i had the idea to stroke a selection with a 75 brush, and then apply a layermask, but that was difficult to get right
also the angel is too random, because it depends on the outer lettersize



so i tried to make another gradient (attached below) and stroke it with the Repeat on Triangular





any ideas how to improve this technique ?

I think the second one looks good esper. You could try something along the lines of this tutorial to get the metallic effect so its more random.

damn, why didnt i think of this ??

i knew you would come with a good idea, he4rty

thank you !!!!

Wow he4rty that's a very cool technique in the tut, I'll give it a go tomorrow

he4rty: that tutorial is a great find, thanks for sharing!

To feed your text effect fetishism, I can provide some digital art history, (:

It seems that this text effect was called 'marble' back then, and we can trace some early examples, travelling back to 1987, when having 32 colors simultaneously displayed on your 14'' monitor was high end standard. All thanks to THE graphic editor of that time, named Deluxe Paint, here shown in live action on an amiga computer.


A fascinating era, but I'm a fanboy of course (:

thanks anarkhya for the background info

that amiga paint program must have been awesome !
i started pretty late with computers, but my neighbor had a Spectrum, where keyboard and computer where one unit connected to a TV *lol*
you had to type loads of pages of code from a magazine and if you only made one mistake the whole program wouldnt run

a friend of mine runs an 80ies related blog and does some 80ies style texteffectlogos:
http://wunderbare80er.blogspot.de/search/label/Logo



BTW, the chrome curves on a gradient for the stroke didnt work
well, i does work, but it doesnt look like what i wanted

Thanks for the Vid, I had deluxe paint on an atari 520st, which I do believe came out before the amiga and opereated on a windows style os.

Btw, Speccy still has its 'scene' and its fanboys, even if it's ridiculously hard to do graphics on a spectrum because of its limited color capabilities.

Wow, so many eighties beauties on one page, thanks for the link !


Ahah, well, here comes the atari representative (you do remember the amiga/atari war)
It seems that the ST and the amiga 1000 were both released in 1985, actually both OS were graphically similar, early GUI for home users, atari ran under TOS.

I am trying to figure out what category this thread is. I thought it started out to be a Metallic Stroke Challenge, now it is all about way back when, or should this part of it be in the Chit Chat Board.

its still Gimp discussion

as anarkhya pointed out, the effect im looking for is called the marble and goes back to the 80ies

i posted an 80ies blog with examples of logos that fit the style

so its all good

My bad, my bad, sorry, I've started the OT.
You can divide and move the topic, starting at post viewtopic.php?f=4&t=6655#p83307

do you know of more links on this topic ?

its hard to google, because lots of results with marble madness come up

I guess it's not easy to search because the term, as I know it, was probably improperly used in that context, besides, these early digital stuffs aren't really mainstream. Have you tried '-' negative parameter? So your keywords look like: marble -madness

yes i did

Ok, so what kind of links do you need, if you want more examples I have links or personal collections of 80's digital logos (more or less sorted by date), if you want text or history that's another deal, because the infos I have are mostly stored on floppies of this era, not very search-friendly

well maybe not examples, although that could be interesting as well, now that i think about it

i was just wondering if there are any PS tutorials that especially deal with the "marble" effect for a stroke

Well, now that I also think about it, examples might probably be redundant as the marble effect, in essence, might always be the same, using repeated gradients inside a contour to give contrast. I think 'marble' is a dead end, it seems that the term is not popular enough in this context, you'd have to find a popular synonym I guess.

just discovered, there is a marble filter in G'MIC which does exactly what we were talking about

also you can set your gradient to 'Shape: Square', which should be the same as 'Diamond' in PS

Esper - Nice image but it reminded me of the filter File>Create>Logo>3D Outline which is one of Gimp's default text effect filters.

Little bit of playing around, converted your Gradient to a pattern, managed to come up with this.