Experimenting With Gimp On Photos: Castle Photo Transformation Stormy Clouds

Over the last few weeks I have been experimenting with the free software Gimp, to see what I could do and also to learn all about the digital side of computer art, because that's what I feel my art needs, a digital edge to make it look professional and so I urge all artists to learn about computer art early on, or do a course about it.          

So here we have a castle ruin photo that we took in the summer and thought I would have a go at editing it so the sky looks kind of stormy instead of a nice summers day, bare in mind that I am totally new to this and I'm having fun too, first I uploaded the photo into my Gimp control panel ready for editing and I used the pipette tool to select a good grey colour from the castle ruin structure and this would be the grey to use for the sky in between the clouds.

I then used the colour fill tool to fill in the blue with the grey, obviously it didn't fill the whole blue colour with grey as there was bits of blue still showing, but I tried to use some of this to show the calm under the storm, then I picked a darker grey to the first grey colour and airbrushed on the underside of the clouds and this would later be blended using the smudge tool which is amazing by the way.

And so it was just a case of softening the edges where I'd been and the end result was a decent but quick art piece....

Of course as a first attempt, I know that I can't just use the smudge tool all the time and that's it, as there are other features and tools that are more advanced, so I'd recommend Gimp for anyone who draws and ants to take their art to the next level, it's free, but if you already have photoshop then you've already probably done a bit of digital art here and there.

I'd like to do more of these Gimp blog posts to show you the features and stuff you can do, so hopefully I'll get better at it.

See some more examples of my Gimp Adventure ( I'm not a gimp!!)