Tag Archives: Tutorial

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.

Steve Allen

June 12, 2012

Avatar of Steve Allen

I would like to thank my facebook friends who have joined our happy little band tonight and have entered our competition to win £30 worth of goods from our catalogues. I hope that you will all take a look around this site and start to enjoy the benefits of membership.

As a member, you are now able to leave comments on our postings and, if you have an event to advertise (especially those for charitable causes), you will be allowed to make your own postings. If you are of an artistic nature you might take a look at some of our tutorials or event submit a gallery of your own work in the East Wing of our gallery. You are also invited to contribute to our clip art resources to help other members with their own work.

Last night we achieved 10,000 hits on the site (excluding members) since we started up at the end of January, and are currently averaging more than 100 hits per day. This means that your contributions will have a good chance of getting seen!! Happy

Very soon I will be introducing you to another charity that the company is supporting, this time in Cockermouth, Cumbria. I hope that you will give it the same kind of support that you gave to Mandy and her friends in Nottinghamshire earlier in the year. More details to follow in the next week or so.

Lastly, I would like to wish the teams from Fraserburgh and Westhill our best wishes for their performances in the Scottish Rock Challenge finals tomorrow night, especially as this will give me something else of local interest to report to you all. Good luck guys – Break a Leg!!

Ubuntu Wallpaper

Good Riddance April – May is here!

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I, for one, am glad to see the back of April 2012. Not only did we see the wettest month for some considerable time in many parts of the country, but those of you who know me personally, will know that I also had a major family tragedy with which to contend. I am therefore looking to May to help make amends for a truly miserable month.

There were a few things, however, that came out of April that are worthy of note. The first being the launch of Ubuntu 12.04 which, I believe, has managed to convince one of my friends of 50 years to admit that Linux might be a good thing! I have also learned how to make (albeit somewhat dodgy) tutorials for Gimp and Inkscape, which I have posted earlier on this blog. For this reason, I took a bit of time off tonight to produce an Ubuntu wallpaper in celebration. I hope that this will inspire some of our readers to give Inkscape a go so that we can start a small gallery of our work. I offer this as my ‘opener’ for, I hope, many more contributions of this type:-

Ubuntu Wallpaper

Ubuntu Wallpaper

All the techniques used to produce this 1600 x 900 pixel wallpaper have been covered by my tutorials on this blog so, theoretically, you can all produce something similar (or, hopefully better) by giving my tutorials a go.

We have a lot lined up for our readers in May, including:-

  • Rock Challenge stuff from Cockermouth School ( and others),
  • More information on the Glasgow Kettlebells event,
  • Results from our ‘sponsored’ team at the Crimond Stock Car races,
  • Information on the Aberdeen Ice Hockey scene,
  • More competitions in conjunction with Waves Radio,
  • More of ‘Billy’s Bargains’ (hopefully as good as the pen drives from last month),
  • Tutorials from yours truly on Gimp use,
  • Postcards from around the world (I am going on holiday),
  • Much more of our usual features.

If anyone else would like to help with contributions, please make yourself known to us, as we would like to keep this blog lively and relevant to our readers’ interests.

I am also waiting for contributions coming in for inclusion in our ‘user clip art galleries’. All contributions, no matter what their quality, would be gratefully received and would help to contribute to the community nature of this blog.

A last appeal to all of our readers in North East Scotland to help support our radio show on Fridays by entering our prize competitions. We intend to be offering some ‘Ping’ polo shirts for our “Where’s Waves?’ contest this week, so be sure to tune in to 101.2 FM at 6 o’clock on Friday!!

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 →

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 →