i have a folder for unfinished gimp and inkscape projets and every now and then i look through it, pick some projects up and toy with them a bit and then throw most of them right back. occasionally one or two gets finished, usually in completely different ways than i had planned from the start. today one of those things happened when i found the beginning of a space scene i had started to make from a tutorial - i got tired of the whole thing because it seemed so pointless but when i saw it today i just knew how i wanted to finish it - so here it is . nothing spectacular, but at least it no longer looks pointless to me.

I usually have no idea what I want to do, I just start doodling and see what the end result is..... but there is never an end result because I keep getting another idea.

gms9819: i know all too well how that works! that's how my jewellery making has been going on after christmas - i start something, then get a new idea, then think: "oh but if i changed that it would look better" and then think: "hmm... what would happen if i changed this little piece instead?" and i don't finish a single piece. i've got lots of good ideas though!

Yeah, it will drive you crazy unless you just make yourself stop at some point. Then after I hit on something really cool, good enough to post here gimp crashes and naturally I didn't save it yet.

gms9810: murphy's law, you know! is your gimp still crashing a lot?

Really nice AnMal, like the reflection.

I like the water! How did you make it?

he4rty: thank you . adding the reflection was such a simple thing to do but it had a great effect on this.
merrak: thank you! i made the water using map -> displace and a displacement map. i learned that some time ago from a tutorial that's here on gimp chat but of course i can't remember who made the tutorial or what the thread was called . in any case it was a very instructive tutorial and i learned a few new tricks so if i can find the thread again i strongly recommend it!

edit: oh that was almost too easy. here is the thread: http://www.gimpchat.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=993&hilit=mahvin

Thanks! I found a similar one, but it didn't produce nice results.

Nice, abstract result AnMal. One thing I would recommend is to not use lens-flare/supernova to create bright stars. The reason is that lens-flare has been used so much that it just screams "cheap filter" today. Making the flare effect manually or simply ditching the effect altogether is usually better these days.

By the way, I too have a folder sort of like that - I basically create all my new projects in a folder named "wip". Each project gets a new folder. When they are finished and critiqued/fixed I move them to another folder named "archive" where I store all my artwork. But sometimes an image doesn't get to a point where I feel it's finished (or I tire of it), and then it stays in that wip folder. I think I currently have close to a dozen wips in there ... one of those days I'll get to them ...
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Griatch

griatch:tack ska du ha! i can agree about the overuse of lens flare/supernova. it's been used in about a third of the tutorials i've tried. as you probably read this started with an old tutorial result (not completely finished, but the light effects were there), if i had made this from scratch i probably wouldn't have used light effects at all or i would have made them myself.
have you ever fished out something from your wip folder that you haven't even looked at for a while and suddenly just known how you wanted to finish it? that has happened to me a lot.

Aye, I reckon it's used a lot in tutorials, it's a quick way to get a decently spectacular effect.

So far I think my sad record is that I only managed to get one single "old" image out of the wip folder so far. It was an image called "Into its element" which lingered there for nearly two years before I finished it. Sadly it still didn't really work out and I was not too happy with the end result despite so much time to think about it. So not a very good track reckord there.
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Griatch

griatch: maybe it's a bit different when you do realistic painting? my stuff might have more built in room for changes since i like working with faceless human figures and things like that. it gives me such a kick every time i finish something off that has just been lying around and it's fun to see how different it can turn out from what i originally had planned.