This is a good way to make a ribbon. I used a brush to make this ribbon. A brush can only be 512 pixels in width or height.

On a new transparent layer make an edge to the ribbon with the pen tool and stroke the path with a solid color, line width of 3 pixels and no antialiasing.



Then select the line using alpha to selection and fill it with a Foreground to Background black to white linear gradient and copy it to the clipboard.



Then 1 click the brush, 2 choose the clipboard brush, 3 brush selection dialog button, 4 change the spacing in the dockable dialog box to 1.0, and 5 change the size of the brush to the size of the clipboard by clicking the resize button.



Now your brush is ready to use on a new white layer. Simply click in one spot then while holding the Shift key click in another spot.



Alan

PegLeg44, that is a very cool way of making a ribbon. thanks

Nice!
Isn't that more like a banner then a ribbon, I guess it could also be a ribbon as well.

It is a fat ribbon...banner

...

Yes I did mean make a path. I suppose I was trying to convey that it needs to be the shape you want.

I was just thinking that it would probably work to select all and go into quickmask mode and stroke the path instead of doing it on a layer. But that way you wouldn't be able to grab the brush again if you needed it.

Also I have found that this only works if you give the line a 3 pixel stroke.

This filling with a gradient and using as an un-aliased brush works for other kinds of shapes too. Do it with a circle and you can make various pipe shapes etc.

Alan

This is really, really cool. Thanks for sharing it with us!

pegleg44;. that's very clever, thanks for sharing!

That works pretty good, thanks!

You can fill circles and such made with the gimp selection tools after hardenning the edges by first making the selection (like an elipse) then going into QuickMask mode and using the [Colors] [Threshold] on it followed and then exiting quickmask before filling with a gradient.

This was done using a color gradient brush with selection techniques to make it weave.

pegleg44: that's amazing!!! you are a bit of a genius, aren't you?

i've finally got down to experimenting a bit with this, i made some failed attempts with ribbons before but today i found some solutions. i had to do things a bit different. i started out makingg a 3 px stroke and using no antialiasing, spacing of brush set to 1,0 and size of brush set to size of ribbon image. that gave me a ribbon with visible spaces between the stamps and the antialiasing made the ribbon look very jagged and bumpy. i wondered why i needed to turn the antialiasing off, so i made some experiments and compared the resutls. i saw no differences in the gradient between two 3 px strokes with and without antialiasing and the ribbon still had visible spaces between the stamps but looked a lot smoother. so, with no problems with the gradient i decided to keep the antialiasing. then i tried with a bigger size of the original stroke and found that looked better, smaller spaces between the stamps in the ribbon and no problems with how the gradient looked. i ended up making an 8 px antialiased stroke and that gave me a lovely smooth looking ribbon - here's something to compare with:

Oh i just love buried treasure. I always wanted to be an archeologist when i was growing up. Wanted to solve all those Biblical stories and find all those artifacts. Alas i ended up as a welder. Of course forging pieces of steel together does have it's own kind of treasured mystery. But i digress.

Those are some great ribbons folks.

fluffybunny: would i tell if i had? considering where it was hidden it might be dangerous to let people know who had it...

That's strange. Maybe the process has something to do with the brush dynamics or how different video boards work or something. I have everything set to default. Maybe fade has something to do with it. Or resolution.

I've been concentrating on drawing height map images for a couple of years now. I've found some techniques for things. Been drawing a lot of stuff like this.



Alan

Excellent tutorial and enjoying all the other images as well.