Art 5

This was done using Gimp 1.2 (with standard extras and perl-fu)

This is based on the same image as the previous work and did a few more things to it.

This is the final artwork "Sapphire & Steel, Elementals":

  1. Take the non-flattened version of the the previous work; that is, you have a background layer with stars in it, and a layer with Sapphire and Steel in it by themselves.
  2. Duplicate sapphire-steel, call the new layer "steel".
  3. Remove Sapphire from this layer, leaving only Steel.
  4. Duplicate sapphire-steel, call the new layer "sapphire".
  5. Remove Steel from this layer, leaving only Sapphire.
  6. To make the "steel" Steel, make the steel layer active.
    1. Click on the Gradient button in the control panel, select the "Rounded_edge" gradient. (No, I can't remember if this was a standard gradient or a custom one)
    2. Filters -> Colors -> Map -> Gradient-Map
    3. Rename the layer steel-steel. (Originally, this was a duplicate of the steel layer, as I was experimenting)
  7. The "sapphire" Sapphire effect was a combination of a few things. Duplicate sapphire. Call the new layer sapphire-metal.
  8. Click on the gradient button in the control panel, select the Crown_molding gradient.
  9. Make sapphire-metal the current layer. Filters -> Colors -> Map -> Gradient-Map
  10. Filters -> Glass-effects -> Glass-tile. Make the tile a little smaller than the default. Rename this layer sapphire-glass. (originally this was a duplicate of sapphire-metal, because I kept on trying different effects on copies of sapphire-metal, to see which one I liked best)
  11. Change foreground colour to a deep blue.
  12. New layer, Foreground, called "blue".
  13. Reorder the layers if need be in this order:
    • steel-steel (mode: normal)
    • blue (mode: color)
    • sapphire-glass (mode: overlay)
    • sapphire (mode: normal)
    • stars (mode: normal)
  14. Hide all but "blue", "sapphire-glass" and "sapphire".
  15. Merge Visible Layers. You should now have a blue glassy Sapphire, with transparent background. Rename this sapphire-blue.
  16. Now for the background. I had a screen-capture of the opening sequence of Sapphire & Steel, with the winding wireframe path. When I tried using it directly, too much of it was hidden by the people, so I decided it needed to be shrunk.
    1. Open the "opening" picture in Gimp as a separate image.
    2. Reduce its size to 2/3 (Image -> Scale-Image)
    3. Edit -> Copy
    4. Click on Sapphire-Steel image. Edit -> Paste
    5. You should now have a Floating Selection. Move the image down so that it is still centred, but the bottom of it touched the bottom edge of the picture.
    6. Click the New Layer button. You should now have a new layer called Pasted Selection. Rename it "opensmall" and move it down so that it's just above the stars layer.
    7. Layers -> Layer-to-Imagesize
    8. Now we have a problem; the nice galaxy is cut off sharply by the edge of "opensmall".
      1. Add Layer Mask to opensmall.
      2. Make Foreground black (remember it was blue before).
      3. Select the Gradient tool, and make sure it is a Linear gradient from FG to BG (or BG to FG).
      4. Make sure that the active layer is the layer mask of opensmall.
      5. Make a short gradient fill over the area where the sharp cutoff happens. (You may need to undo-redo this until you're happy)
      Now we have them fading together nicely.
  17. Flatten image and save as .jpg