GIMP Version: 2.6.11
Operating System: Windows
OS Version: XP - SP3
GIMP Experience: Basic Level

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I'm working on building a poster with GIMP. What I'm trying to do is make a typography-style poster that I will print onto colored paper. The color of the objects on the poster (such as text and art) will then be determined by the color of the paper. How I'm trying to achieve this is by creating an entirely black layer in GIMP and cutting transparent holes in that black layer in the shape of text and art. Imagine that you're taking a black piece of construction paper and using a pair of scissors or a text punch to cut shapes and texts out of it. Then you take the piece of black construction paper that you cut the shapes out of and paste it on top of a piece of orange construction paper, making the cutouts appear to be orange with a black surrounding. I'm essentially trying to do the same thing, except the black will be my printer ink and the orange will be my colored printer paper.

I already have the text files and images that I want to use, I just need to know how to make these into "transparency stamps" of some sort, so that when I apply them to the black layer they will cut out the black behind them leaving transparency for the colored paper to show through.

I've been trying to find a tutorial on this for the past couple of days with no luck. Anyone out there who knows of a tutorial or is willing to help out?

Thanks!

Typically you get a selection from the shape, select the balck layer and hit the [delete] key. But the devil is in "get a selection from the shape" because it all depends what do your shapes look like... Do you have them on transparent background (Selection: layer/Alpha to selection), on uniform background, as vectors?

If you cut out and paste your items onto a new transparent layer, you can right-click the layer and choose Alpha To Selection. Add another transparent layer on top and choose Selection/Invert and flood fill the layer black. You can then delete your original layer and the background layer and save as either PNG or XCF. You now have a template that can be applied to any background. Hope this helps.

What you could do is create the canvas that you want to do the work on and make a new layer and select all and paste in FG Black. Then open up the files that contain the shapes and make a selection around each shape using the Select by Color or Fuzzy Select tools. And copy to the clipboard. Then go to your working black canvas and choose the eraser tool and then go to [Windows] menu [Dockable Dialogs] and [Brushes]. In this brushes dialog box choose the Clipboard Brush on the top left square. Anything that is copied to the clipboard is available as a brush. Use that to click and erase the black layer where you desire.

The clipboard brush has a limit of 512 by 512 pixels. You could actually do the whole project drawing with a white foreground pencil brush and then you would be able to use the transoformation tools to resize and rotate each element on seperate layers.

Actually the clipboard brush is scaleable from the Tool Options area. So you would not have to resize on it's own layer.


Alan