Create Word Art Logos with GIMP

[Music] this is Niclas logo is by Netcom and in today's tutorial i'll be demonstrating how you can create these word art style 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 of the video if you want to check that out so to get started here I'm gonna open up now I typically don't use for logo design I usually use something vector like Inkscape or Illustrator but for this style of design it really lends itself to something like or you can use manual brushstrokes a little easier than you could with the vector software so what I like to do is I'm gonna use to create the structure of this design and then I'm gonna import it into Inkscape to create a vector tracing later on so as you can see here I have my example image I'll put a link to this image in the description as well if you'd like to follow along with exactly what I'm doing here otherwise you could use whatever image you'd like so the first thing I want to do now is create a new layer on top of this layer and create a silhouette tracing of this subject here so I'm gonna click on this button that says create a new layer and add it to the image click OK to leave the defaults and I'm gonna grab the paths tool which is over here and I'm gonna zoom in over the subject here I'm just gonna hold ctrl and roll up the mouse wheel a few times to zoom in and I'm gonna click to create points going around the outline of the subject here now they don't have to be exact exact points that follow every precise contour of the subject here we're not creating we're not cropping out this image we're just creating a very rudimentary silhouette tracing of it so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go through and create these points real quickly and then I'll catch up with you and I'm done okay so once you're done making your tracing and you have here point your last point right next to your original point what you want to do is connect those two together by holding ctrl and then clicking on the first point and that's going to close the path like there like that and what we want to do now is create a selection from this path so I'm gonna press ENTER on the keyboard and it's gonna create a selection maybe you can't see it on your screen but there's now a dotted line going through those pads that we just created and what I will do now is go to edit fill with foreground color and that's gonna fill that in with black and now we can go to select none to get rid of the selection and I'm just gonna grab I'm gonna click off of this tool onto one of these other tools like the move tool just to get rid of those nodes on the screen there and let me zoom out a little more I'm gonna turn off the visibility of the lip of the original layer down here and I'm going to create a white backdrop beneath the subject here just so we can see what we're doing as we create the individual letters so I'm gonna create a new layer click OK and I want to fill it with white which is the background color as you can see here if it's not you can set your default by clicking this icon right here that I'll set the default back to black and white respectively for the foreground and background I'll go to edit and fill with background color and I'm gonna click and drag this layer beneath the other layer so that is behind the bold image here or the Buffalo rather and what I will do now is I'm going to click on this top layer and create a new layer on top of that and I want to bring the opacity of this layer down maybe about 70% bring it down to like 24 like that then I want to take the foreground color and click on that and make that red click OK and I'm gonna grab the brush over here now the paintbrush tool I'm gonna make the size of about size of it about 8 pixels roughly you want to be about this size right here maybe a little smaller than that maybe something for like that that's pretty good if you want to undo what undo your drawing like I just did there you just press control Z on the keyboard and what I want to do now is this parts gonna take a little bit of manual eyeballing here so like ah what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna go through and manually draw letters where I'd like them to be in this subject here so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna write out the word buffalo with this design I'm gonna start out right here I'm gonna draw a rudimentary letter B like that and again this this what we're creating right here this is just gonna be a guide these aren't the actual designs we're going to be using so don't worry about this looking nice it's gonna look pretty ugly but that's okay I'll put the U right about here I'll put the F right here another F up here the letter A right here and then I'll put the letter L over here and bring the tail of it out there like that and then I guess I'll just put the letter O right here within the space of the of the of the L and that right there is what we're looking for so what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna grab the eraser tool which is over here I want to make sure I have a nice hard brush selected this this one right here hardness 100 and I'm gonna bring the size down to about or up rather to about six or seven pixels and what I'm going to do is I'm gonna zoom in on this image a little bit by holding ctrl and rolling up the mouse wheel I want to come back to this original this middle layer right here and select that the next one down the one that has the subject silhouette on it and what I'll do is to zoom in and out like I said just hold ctrl or roll up and down the mouse wheel to move the page Ram you could press down on the mouse wheel and move the mouse like that so I'm gonna go and just erase the areas between these letters like this just to create the illusion of those letters within the design here down that put a little couple of dashes for the letter B there I'll go over here and do the same thing for the letter U I'll come over here for the letter F let me zoom out a little bit do the same thing over here put a line through there put a line through there and maybe bring this one down same thing over here for this I'm actually gonna come in and add an angle for this letter here so that it follows the direction of the letter A there put that right there they're like that bring this one down and I'll do the same thing over here on this side for the letter A and what I like to do when I'm doing this is I like to zoom out a little bit and toggle off the visibility of the red letters on top of it to see how it's coming out and if you can see it's coming out all right you can see the letters there they don't look very neat and clean but that's kind of the point of the design it's meant to have a very natural sort of look like it's like a hand-drawn design let me turn on the visibility of that again come back over here take out this part of the letter a finally I'll come over here for the letter L I'll bring that straight through and then for the letter O I'll just put like a little dash right here now let me zoom out let me turn off the visibility of that layer and you can see here we kind of have we kind of have our design pretty much set now what I like to do is you just go through and just clean it up a little bit if you notice here's a little bit of a smidge sticking out there I'm gonna hold alt and just color that back in when you have the eraser tool alt holding alt allows you to do the opposite of a race it colors it back in so that's one handy trick to keep in mind that I'm going to go through and just clean this up a little bit like over here I'm gonna make the corner of this rounded so that it looks more like a letter O maybe I'll come over here and put some more space in the between the letter A legs right here that looks a little better maybe a little more space in here maybe you'll do the same thing for the letter B just a little more a little more space within that those negative space areas of the letter B looking better maybe a little bit for the letter U there we go and I'll just do the same thing for the letter O over here maybe I'll round the edges of this over here so that looks more like an O nice rounded edges maybe I'll bring this to more of a point and I think that right there is looking pretty good I'm gonna leave that as it is and then what you can do now is just turn off the visibility over the white background beneath the on the layer beneath that and you can see you have our transparent background here you can go ahead and export this as a dot PNG image and it'll have a nice transparent background like that you could even change the color of this if you'd like now once you take this design and bring it into your vector software and create a vector copy of it it's gonna look even better it's gonna have like a nice clean crisp look to it I mean this looks pretty good as it is right now but if you really want to get that good finishing touch then I would recommend creating that effect or tracing of it so I think that should do it for this tutorial that's how you can go about creating these word art style logos using if you have any questions let me know and as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 71,461

Keywords:

Id: 6EFoz6ic0Wc

Length: 9min 56sec (596 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 08 2020