Category Archives: Tutorials

This is a few ‘beginner’s guides’ geared toward customers who are not particularly interested in becoming Graphic Artists, but are still more than a bit intrigued as to what it is that we do. Hopefully, these articles will serve well as an introduction, and might inspire you to delve further into the subject. You will soon realize that there is more to graphic art than ‘cutting and pasting’. Ask Andrew…he knows!!

Animated Banners and Buttons

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Once I am over my bout of ‘Man-Flu’ which is making my voice a bit croaky, I will be making a little tutorial on producing animated banners and buttons using my old friend GIMP.

If you are not sure of what these are, below you will see an example of something that I made tonight for one of my groups on deviantArt using one of the images that can be found in the clip art gallery on this blog.

dA-Animal-Lovers

An avatar button made for the dA-Animal-Lovers group on deviantArt

I am hoping that this might inspire some more of you to start using FOSS in the near future. The link to download the program can be found in the footer of this page.

Inkscape Tutorial – Art Nouveau Swirls

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As promised, I have now produced another screencast Inkscape tutorial to show how to make ‘Art Nouveau’ style motifs, which you can use on your own projects, or as part of a border (tutorial to follow). I have not yet fully mastered the production techniques but, thanks to Nigel and Ray, I know what I have to work on with regard to this aspect.

Could I therefore request that any critiques be addressed to the content, rather than the quality (or lack of quality) of the video this time around. I need to know if it is understandable, if I am going too fast, too slow etc.

Please feel free to comment this post with any constructive ideas.

I hope that you found this of interest, and that it may have inspired one or two of you to give Inkscape ‘a go’, especially as it will cost you nothing. I would also be interested to see what you guys can produce, so please feel free to send us your efforts.

Video Test – A Short Tutorial

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This posting is very much a trial to see if I am able to use my current set-up to produce video tutorials. I have no idea if this will work on any operating system other than my own, so I would really appreciate all of your feedback on this. Please click to watch.


I have spent some time trying to embed this and, thanks to my friend @squidjam on twitter (other social media sites are available) we appear to have a functional video!!!

Any way, enjoy the (test) tutorial..I hope that it is useful!

Swirl Motif

Swirl Motif – Tutorial 2

Further to the interest in my earlier Gimp tutorials, I have spent some time this evening working on a few simple ideas for beginners in Inkscape. As this is going to take me some considerable amount of time to produce, I have made a start by putting together a few screenshots with a view to using them to illustrate a set of 3 tutorials, on simple decorative motifs, over the weekend. Continue reading →

Nouveau Tabletop

Coming soon…

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Just over a week ago, I gave readers of this blog a list of things to come in the near future. If you refer to this list and compare with what we have posted during the ensuing period, I’m sure that you will agree that we have very nearly completed ‘our manifesto’. In light of the aforesaid, I am producing this by way of an update to give you a taste of what is to come on this blog over the next couple of weeks.

  1. Rock Challenge news from several schools in England and an update from Fraserburgh and Westhill as they prepare for the Dundee Scottish regional finals.
  2. News about our support for 3 cancer charities, in Fraserburgh, Cockermouth and (now) Nottingham.
  3. Tutorials on using the Inkscape vector graphics program to produce ‘Art Nouveau’ style borders and motifs.
  4. More tutorials on using Gimp to produce elementary photomanipulations.
  5. Pictures and news about one of our stock car racing customers.
  6. More ‘Special Offers’ from Billy.
  7. More clip art, photoclips, fonts, flags, borders and more.
  8. Another Caption Contest, this time ‘just for fun’.
  9. Results of the March competition, along with the winning entries.
  10. More details about the April contest (the lottery).
  11. Anything else that crops up during everyday life at PomPrint Designs (hopefully more local photographs if the weather holds).

In support of items 3 and 4 (above) I have put together a piece of artwork to illustrate some of the techniques that I intend to cover in the next few tutorials.

Nouveau Tabletop

Nouveau Tabletop - click to enlarge

Here you can see that I have made up a simple curvy motif and used it to make a border and a set of mathematically-inspired ‘subjects’. I have also included the use of textures and gradient fills (on the table top) and the superimposing of one of our photoclips (a lily in this case, to give an eastern feel), complete with shadow.

Although I have had a little bit of feedback about my GIMP tutorials, mainly about the way they were written and presented, I have yet to hear from anyone who has used them successfully. Please contribute if you can!! This site is specifically designed for all its members to share ideas and resources.

Creative Commons Licence
This work by PomPrint Designs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.pomprint.co.uk.

Tutorial – Creating your own Photo Clip Art – Part 4 (Finishing off)

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This article is part 4 in a tutorial. It is recommended that you read the first three parts first.

So far we have made a roughly cut-out version of our daffodil flower floating on a transparent background. If you zoom in to the edges of the petals, what I mean by rough-cut becomes all too apparent – this mosaic like effect, with occasional bits of background and a few bits of petal missing can now be ‘healed’ by working on the transparency mask that we set up in the last part of this tutorial. Continue reading →

Tutorial – Creating your own Photo Clip Art – Part 3 (Using the Alpha Channel)

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This article is part three in a tutorial. It is recommended that you read parts 1 & 2 first.

In part 2 of this tutorial, I explained how to use the scissors tool to produce a rough selection around the daffodil flower. This selection area is now going to be used to produce a mask that we add can add to the alpha channel of the image. By working on the mask, we can obtain a smooth transition from opaque (the flower) to transparent (the background), with no jagged edges. Continue reading →