I am *sooo* proud of myself, I figured out how to do something neat with GIMP, all by myself!

I was wondering how to make a “transparency” – kind of like when you print an image on transparency paper, then glue it to a collage – except I wanted to figure out how to “paste” a digital image into a digital collage.

Example: left image has reduced opacity, right does not

Turns out it’s actually pretty easy with GIMP!

1. Open your background image
2. Open the image to use as a transparency as a layer (it’s an option in the open file menu)
3. Edit > Copy that file to the clipboard
4. Click back to your background image, Edit > Paste as new layer
5. Make sure you have the “Move” tool selected in the toolbox, and move the new layer where you want it to go
6. Still working with your new layer, go to the layer box, and change the opacity until some of the background shows through – you can pick anything from 0% to 100% for how opaque the layer is – the smaller the number, the more the background will show through.

And that’s it! When you are happy with how your picture looks, you can save it as a .jpg. In the “Save as” dialogue box, click where it says file type, scroll down to .jpg and select that. Then it will tell you that you have to export the file first, say okay, and then choose the quality (I use 100%, because I can always resize the file later with Picasa).

I bet the process is pretty much the same in Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro.

Now I just need to figure out how to make parts of an image transparent & other parts opaque… so that if I wanted, say, the outline to be opaque but the rest transparent….anyone know how to do that?

Found a couple sites with GIMP tutorials related to digital scrapbooking, hoping to have time to read through them soon:
http://www.scrapbooksgonedigital.com/TUTORIALS/
http://brainsongimp.blogspot.com/

Not that I want to do digital scrapbooking, exactly, but I bet digiscrap sites will have information on a lot of the collage-like techniques I’m interested in. One of the things I’m inspired to try and learn about in June (my inspiration month) is mixed media art techniques, and that includes digital! I think it would be really cool to take some of my digital photos and turn them into artwork, using software and/or paint, drawing, collage, etc.

And once I have some digital art I’m happy with…I want to get it printed really small and make glass or resin pendants with my own original artwork on them. And maybe magnets or coasters too – why not?