Create Watercolor Logos with GIMP

this is Nick with logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'm going to demonstrate how you can create these watercolor logos using and if you'd like to learn more about how works be sure to check out the series which is a collection of over 60 videos where I go over all of the major tools and features in and I explain what they are and demonstrate how they work I'll put a link in the description if you want to check that out so let's go ahead and get started here in the first thing we're gonna start out with is our example image and this dog here is what I'm going to use to make a logo out of and if you'd like to follow along with what I'm doing I will have a link to all of the the example images I'm using in this tutorial otherwise you can use some images of your own so the first thing I want to do here is just create a silhouette of this dog here and to do that I'm going to use the paths tool which is over here the keyboard shortcut for that is B but I want to put this on its own layer so I'm gonna come down here to where it says create a new layer I'm gonna click on that and I'm just gonna name this layer outline go ahead and click OK and I'm going to zoom in on the dog's feet over here by holding ctrl and rolling up the mouse wheel and if I want to move the page around I can just press down the mouse-wheel and move around the mouse like that and I'm going to click to create a point there and I'll click to create more points going around the outline of the dog here and don't worry about the lines being precise going precisely around the outline of your subject here because they don't have to be precise in fact it this this sort of logo works better when they're not precise because it's supposed to be like a watercolour painting so I'm going to go ahead and create some points going around the edges here I'll go ahead and speed this up so you don't have to sit here and watch me do all of this okay one thing I forgot to mention is that when you're creating these points if you accidentally put a point somewhere or it's not supposed to be you can quickly undo it by hitting ctrl Z on the keyboard and that will undo the most recent point like that so what we're going to do is I'm gonna finish up this outline going around the edge here and right back to the starting point right before I click on the starting point I'm gonna hold ctrl and then I click on that starting point and what that does is it'll close the path and what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna press ENTER on the keyboard and that's gonna create a selection from that path there and I'm going to go to edit fill with foreground color and that's gonna fill it with black as you can see there now let me go to select none let me take let me grab a different tool just to get rid of the paths from the screen there and then I'll go back to the paths tool if you notice here there's some negative space like in between like the tail right here that I need to account for so we're gonna do is I'm gonna take the opacity of this layer I'm going to bring this down a little bit so I can see what's underneath it and you could see where we have the negative space that I need to punch out here so I'm gonna grab the paths tool your subject may or may not have this depending on the image you're using but I'm just gonna do this quickly for mine because mine does I'm gonna use the paths tool here to create another selection going in there again hold ctrl click on the original path to close it press Enter and now instead of filling that in I'm just gonna press Delete on the keyboard to delete that area in there I'm gonna select none and if you're using a Mac I've heard that pressing delete on the keyboard doesn't work so if you're using a Mac just go to edit clear and that should do the trick there let me go back up here and finally to where the tail is let me click off of that click back on it there we go delete select none we grab the move tool and I'm gonna press 1 on the keyboard to zoom back out to a hundred percent I'm gonna bring the opacity of that layer all the way back up to 100% and now I'm going to turn off the visibility of the layer beneath it which is the original layer with the image on it before you do that you just want to right-click on this and where it says add alpha Channel make sure you have that clicked if it's grayed out like you see on my screen that means it's it's already set you don't have to do it but if you can click on that go ahead and click on that so that when you turn off the visibility by clicking this eyeball right here it becomes transparent behind it like that and that right there is what we're looking for so this is going to be the shape of our logo what we're gonna do now is create the watercolour portion of the design which is over here in this image what you want to do is grab yourself a nice colorful image like this again I'll have a link to this image in the description if you want to follow along with exactly what I'm doing and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to apply the oil if I effects to this so I'm going to go to filters artistic and I'm going to click on oil if I grab that menu and I'm gonna take the mask radius and I'm going to bring that all the way up like that well not all the way but like maybe three-quarters of the way you're gonna notice the image changing on your screen as you do that I'll bring the exponent up as well see how that looks you give it a second to render it is a little CPU intensive maybe a little more try that out maybe bring that up a little more you might you might want to play around for the little to see what it looks best right there I think that's pretty good I'm gonna go ahead and click OK to finalize that and now I'm gonna go back to my subject image over here I'm gonna go to edit copy know you know what I want to go to copy visible edit copy visible and I'll come over here back to our image over here and go to edit paste as new layer and now I want to bring down the opacity of that new layer just a little bit just so I could see what's underneath the big sup because I'm gonna line this up with exactly where I want it to be placed and I'm going to grab the unified transform tool which is over here or what I like to do is I like to just press shift T on the keyboard to grab it there we go and now I'm going to grab this node over here to the bottom right if you notice there's two little squares in here there's one bigger square and then there's once tinier diamond do you want to make sure you're grabbing the bigger square and not the diamond in there I'm gonna click and drag on that and then hold ctrl and shift to scale that down proportionately from the center like that and then I'm gonna hold alt and click and drag it just to move it over like that and I'm gonna place this dog right about where I want the the colors to show through I want these colors right here to show through so I'm gonna leave that right about there go ahead and press enter on the keyboard to finalize that and now we could bring the opacity of that layer all the way back up to 100% and what I'm actually gonna do now is I'm going to turn off the visibility of that layer and I'm going to create a new layer I'm gonna click on this button over here this is create a new layer and edit of the image and where it says fill with I want to fill this with white click OK and now we have this new white layer I want to take this and just click and drag this beneath beneath everything else all the way to the bottom like that and now I want to click on our original layer where our images and I want to right click on that and go to add layer mask and once we get the layer mask menu we want to choose black full transparency go ahead and click add and what that's going to do is it's gonna get rid of the visibility of that entire layer there and it's only going to show through in areas where we add the color white so I want to come up here I just want to swap around my foreground and background colors so that white is the foreground and back is the black round you can do that by pressing that little arrow right there and up here where we have our silhouette layer this pasted layer right here it'll show you in the preview window window there I want to right click that and go to alpha to selection right there and it's gonna create an outline going around your subject and now I want to click on the pasted layer right beneath it but when you click on it make sure you select this black box right here and not the actual image and you'll know you have it selected down here in the status bar where it says pasted layer or when you click that as as pasted layer mask you want to have pasted layer mask selected there like that and what I'm gonna do now is I'm just gonna go to edit fill with foreground color and it's gonna fill it in like that now gonna go to select none and what I'll do now is I'm going to grab the paintbrush which is right here and the brush I'm going to use is this brush over here it's blacks oh one it'll show you a title up here in the status bar just go ahead and grab that brush I believe it is a default brush in game so just go ahead and look for that and again you want to make sure you have your foreground set to white and then just go ahead and click to add like a little bit of a like like brush dots on there I may bring down the size of that brush a little bit put that there like that and again if you don't like how it came out you could just undo it by hitting control Z and that right there looks pretty good I think I'll leave that as it is and once you're finished with that what you could do is you could turn off the visibility of the white outline layer beneath it and then you can right-click on this layer that we have selected here the middle one and go to apply layer mask and that's going to finalize it and there you go you have created your little silhouette watercolor logo and if you want you can turn the visibility of the white outline back on so you can add some text here and you know use the text tool to add some text there do whatever you'd like or what you can do is if you if you want to export it just as it is and then import it into something like Inkscape or illustrator so you can create a vector copy if I didn't add your text that way you could turn off the visibility of the outline layer and go to image crop to content and then it'll only make it as big as it has to be and then you can go to file export as and you can export it as a dot PNG image with a transparent background so you can work with it further on from there so that should do it for this tutorial that's how you can go about creating those watercolor logos using if you have any questions let me know and as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 88,046

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp logo tutorial, gimp watercolor, watercolor logos, logos by nick, logosbynick, nick saporito

Id: fSOR7mPwb4I

Length: 10min 32sec (632 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 14 2019