How to make a comic dot background in Gimp


In the previous post I showed some examples that used this typee of "comic book dots". The technique is  called halftones. In this post I want to show how to do this background using Gimp 2.10.

Thee background is made of three parts: A grayscale gradient, halftones, and the coloring.  

The halftones are the result of applying the distort filter newsprint in Gimp. Note that the application of this filter on either white (#FFFFFF) or black (#000000) does not yield any dots. The resulting dots of a gradient between light greys are back on white background. Below thee gradient goes from 100% white to 85% white:

Note the offset and the starting point at the middle of the image.

Now for the halftones. The default on my Gimp is lines, so I had to change it to circles. Also note that the dot size is worth playing with:

And finally the coloring. This is done by a second layer with the layer mode set to Addition.

All this gives this:



If you want a stronger dots make the gradient run through dark greys and make the dot size (call period in the dialog) bigger.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Presentation sin: Overtime

Going overtime in a presentation is a common failure in scientific presentations. However practicing your talk should prevent this from happening. The scene is unfortunately quite familiar. A professor or student has 90/60/25 minutes for his or her presentation and it goes overtime. While the speaker keeps talking, the students need to run to another lecture, the next speaker is annoyed, or the audience wants to go to the break. Although we know this shouldn't happen, we see it often at conferences and lecture halls. I thought it happened because people  did not practice enough. But a friend of mine, who also happens to be involved in academia, told me two weeks ago that is not always the case. She said professors and students go overtime to show that they have more say, that it shows their passion for the topic.  At first I was skeptical, but I started thinking about some  of the talks I have heard/ and delivered in the past, and realized it is also true. People overtime to sh
Read more

How to crop images with circles in Keynote

Image
Here is a way to deal with images that come in different sizes and/or orientations: mask them with circles.  Here is what I mean You have probably already seen this with Google and Apple productions. Circles are fun, dynamic, harmonious, and they are also points. Now, there is a whole visual grammar behind points, but that's not the topic of this post. Let's do the before-after thing. Consider this fake slide By the way, also Featured pictures from Wiki Commons. The images are very good, but we can take them to the next level.  Their sizes are around 700px, so I'll mask them with circles with a diameter of 300px. This is the result Certainly better, but how did I do it? Most Slideware packages allow you to crop an image with a shape .  Google it and you'll get the technical know-how. I'll demo with Keynote 6.   Select a Circle: Insert > Shape > Cicle. Make it the size that you want.  We'll rescale all images at the end, so don&
Read more

On why I hate LaTeX/Beamer

Image
Continuing with a last's year post, I make a case in point about how using LaTeX/Beamer is bad for scientific presentations.   Last year I wrote about LaTeX/Beamer and how it was worse than bad PowerPoint. One or two weeks ago I found a presentation on Slideshare done in Beamer, by people I know. They are excellent scientists at Germany's best research center. It is partly not their fault, they are applied mathematicians, and in mathematics LaTeX and, to a lesser degree Beamer,  are industry standards. The problem of using Beamer for scientific talks is that it employs the same narrative of a written essay: Title, introduction, first section, second subsection, conclusion. Another problem is that Beamer enforces the use of off-the-shelf templates, and the command-line nature of Beamer makes its customization very time consuming. The use of predefined templates one of the causes of  the death by PowerPoint. The creation of a math talk using Beamer is a soporific bomb. To sh
Read more