The Discovery

I’ve always been interested in computer graphics. I think this stems from my interest in traditional art (drawing and photography) and my interest in technology and computers. I recently started to do some web design and stumbled across/discovered the open source program GIMP.

GIMP is short for GNU Image Manipulation Program, which is an open source, freely distributed image program (think adobe photoshop). The program is incredible in what it can do and if you have any interests at all in touching up photos or other computer artwork I encourage you to check out their site and the program itself. GIMP and the online community surrounding it offers a huge number of tutorials for all skill levels and I got in to learning about the program through these documents.

I began to play with some pictures that I had taken (I also enjoy photography) and came up with a number of nice images:

This image was taken at Shenandoah National Park during my girlfriend and I’s hiking expedition last summer. I really like the effect of a color area in a black and white picture.

This is a quick snapshot of one of my bikes (biking is somewhat of an obsession of mine). Along with the selective colorization, I also added some patterned text with a shadow.

In running through a lot of these tutorials I came across a huge number of things that GIMP can do. One of them being designing images for the web.

A few years ago my mother started a craft business which has really taken off. For Christmas last year I designed a website for her business in which I used GIMP for all the design work. After learning CSS, I am fairly happy with the way the site came out. It is a great way for me to learn about web design and for her to showcase some of her artwork. She would be thrilled if you took a look at it: Birds on a Feather.

I had started to play around with the 3D logo effect in GIMP (the feather logo uses it a little bit) and wanted to expand. This led to the discovery of the fabulous 3D open source program called Blender.

That was about a month ago and ever since I have been in awe. It is like this whole new world of computer graphics that I knew about, but could never break into before. I am still just scratching the surface now, but if you have any interest at all in 3D design do a little research about Blender.

I’ll follow up next time with some of my first Blender projects and what I’ve been working on recently!

The Discovery

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