First signature made (GIMP)

[Lon'Kill]

Well, I'm really noob with this sort of things. Now, I made this signature some hours ago, I didn't want to add that many layers because I didn't want to overwhelmed it with them. So Here is my very first signature on GIMP

Please, tell me, how I did? I know that I must polish a lot of techniques. But your critics will help me a lot.

[Vestige]

It's uhhhhh, it's not very good, I'll be honest. But you already knew that. I'm not the best, but I think I know something, so I'll share some tips with you.

• First order of business is to remove the renders' watermark. It's cool to give credit to your sources, but you don't need that in the signature itself, it honestly just ruins it most of the time.
• Second, which is more of a personal preference thing, is I suggest checking out Paint.NET instead of GIMP. I tried GIMP and I didn't like it that much, and I found PDN to be far more user-friendly and intuitive. If you've already checked out the program, or don't want to use it, then ignore this.
• I highly suggest going online and creating yourself a "catalog" of resources to use in your sigs. Keyterms to search for are "bokeh lights" "cd4 renders" and "textures". Oftentimes if you don't want to look for these 1 by 1, you can peruse deviantart.com for "packages" that come with oftentimes 10+ of the above.
• Borders. Not everyone likes to use borders, but I find that they make the sig look just a bit more crisp. You can see mine has a top and bottom border, but it's missing the sides. That's just a stylistic thing, but a lot of my others have full borders all around. You can try various thickness levels, but 1px should be good enough.
• I suggest looking up some signature making tutorials. There's a bunch that are tailored specifically for photoshop and for paint.net (so I'm sure there are for GIMP as well). If not, just tailor the steps towards your program. It should be very similar.
• Useful tools are blur, dodge, and burn. Use them. Just don't overdo it.
• When you add things like textures, and cd4's to your signature, try different blending modes and transparencies to see which gives you the desired effect you're looking for.
• Always use layers so when you change something on one layer, you can see it's effect on the signature overall without affecting any of the other elements. I've had upwards of 30 layers at a time in my signatures, just to give you an idea.

Here's a really basic step-by-step "guide" for you to think about as you go to make your next sig.

1. Find your render

2. Put your texture(s) underneath the render.

3. Put however many cd4's you want under the render and above the texture.

4. You can put more textures over the cd4's.

5. Put a FEW (or none) cd4's over the render, if you like.

6. I like putting some bokeh lights over the render, but you can put them under as well (I sometimes do both. And blur out the ones that are underneath the render layer).

7. You can duplicate your render layer and change the blending mode to give it a different color. Alteratively try using the burn and dodge tool on parts of the render as you see fit.

8. Put any text you want.

9. Put your border.

10. Done.

Again this is a really simple "thought-process" type list, and I highly recommend looking up a tutorial or two online and following those steps. They are seriously helpful and I used, and still use them, quite a lot when making my sigs. The particularly well made ones have pictures and everything to help you as you go along. Good luck, and have fun with the rest. :)

[Lon'Kill]

It's uhhhhh, it's not very good, I'll be honest. But you already knew that. I'm not the best, but I think I know something, so I'll share some tips with you.

• First order of business is to remove the renders' watermark. It's cool to give credit to your sources, but you don't need that in the signature itself, it honestly just ruins it most of the time.
• Second, which is more of a personal preference thing, is I suggest checking out Paint.NET instead of GIMP. I tried GIMP and I didn't like it that much, and I found PDN to be far more user-friendly and intuitive. If you've already checked out the program, or don't want to use it, then ignore this.
• I highly suggest going online and creating yourself a "catalog" of resources to use in your sigs. Keyterms to search for are "bokeh lights" "cd4 renders" and "textures". Oftentimes if you don't want to look for these 1 by 1, you can peruse deviantart.com for "packages" that come with oftentimes 10+ of the above.
• Borders. Not everyone likes to use borders, but I find that they make the sig look just a bit more crisp. You can see mine has a top and bottom border, but it's missing the sides. That's just a stylistic thing, but a lot of my others have full borders all around. You can try various thickness levels, but 1px should be good enough.
• I suggest looking up some signature making tutorials. There's a bunch that are tailored specifically for photoshop and for paint.net (so I'm sure there are for GIMP as well). If not, just tailor the steps towards your program. It should be very similar.
• Useful tools are blur, dodge, and burn. Use them. Just don't overdo it.
• When you add things like textures, and cd4's to your signature, try different blending modes and transparencies to see which gives you the desired effect you're looking for.
• Always use layers so when you change something on one layer, you can see it's effect on the signature overall without affecting any of the other elements. I've had upwards of 30 layers at a time in my signatures, just to give you an idea.

Here's a really basic step-by-step "guide" for you to think about as you go to make your next sig.

1. Find your render

2. Put your texture(s) underneath the render.

3. Put however many cd4's you want under the render and above the texture.

4. You can put more textures over the cd4's.

5. Put a FEW (or none) cd4's over the render, if you like.

6. I like putting some bokeh lights over the render, but you can put them under as well (I sometimes do both. And blur out the ones that are underneath the render layer).

7. You can duplicate your render layer and change the blending mode to give it a different color. Alteratively try using the burn and dodge tool on parts of the render as you see fit.

8. Put any text you want.

9. Put your border.

10. Done.

Again this is a really simple "thought-process" type list, and I highly recommend looking up a tutorial or two online and following those steps. They are seriously helpful and I used, and still use them, quite a lot when making my sigs. The particularly well made ones have pictures and everything to help you as you go along. Good luck, and have fun with the rest. :)

Thank you very much, that is exactly what I needed. I like GIMP, but I will try the other one you suggested. (thou, where did you found photoshop? you bought it?

Any way, I'll do the things that you said, and I downloaded a ton of CD4's renders (looking for more, thou.

Thank you very much and I hope to make it better the next time.

[Vestige]

No problem. Glad I could have helped. I haven't actually used photoshop, I've just seen tutorials for it is all.

Just keep practicing. My first couple of sigs were beyond garbage, but once I got the hang of things and I gathered my resources they started getting a bit better. Practice does make perfect after all. :)

[Dwlr]

Gimp can be clunky that's forsure, but it has far less issues than Paint.net once you learn how to use both effectively Gimp can do more.

C4ds are really meant to be accents not the main component of an image, following Vestiges advice of layering c4d after c4d after c4d you're not actually creating anything, layering resources is no different than a child with scissors and glue making a collage out of images they find in magazines.

C4ds on screen can add a variety of accents, but if you want to be able to claim you've actually made something you need to do more than copy and paste changing layer styles and starting with those practices are the sure path to not being able to improve or actually make a variety of styles, they'll all just blend together with differences only being based on the resources that you pasted on your canvas.

A good place to start is with the smudge tool. The smudge tool can form a base using the render you have chosen as a starting point for your background. By distorting the unsized image (leave it big) you can ensure that your background's base is going to be something that matches the render you've chosen and no matter what you choose to do in the future smudging is a good technique to have in your pocket as it can not only be used to distort, but can create effects in it's own right that you can genuinely claim ownership of when you finish. Rome wasn't built in a day, you have to start somewhere, start simple, but don't start with ripping others work using them as 'resources' sure that's what they're there for, but the goal first and foremost should be to create something otherwise there are plenty of images on google you could simply crop and put text on and use.

Try:

1) Filling the canvas with black

2) Pasting your full render (moving it around until you find a nice base, then lowering the opacity to 40ish, and applying a Gaussian Blur with a radius of 2ish)

3) Pasting your full render again (move around until you find a nice spot, apply a Gaussian Blur with a radius of 1ish)

4) Pasting your full render again (move it around until you find a nice spot, leave at it's starting sharpness)

5) Pasting and re-sizing your render (try to postion the render render in such a way that it ends up in one of the intersections of the Rule of Thirds *generally a good composition practice*

It's simple enough and you're not doing much to it for starters, but it's a simple starting point for a little depth, unlike pasting in c4ds using light and varying degrees of sharpness can apply to everything you ever make in the future so it's something to start working on early so you can get a feeling of how objects farthest will be more blurry than objects closer to your focal. You can extend this practice to objects above your focal as well, but in reverse. Objects too close to the viewer will be more blurry than objects closer to your focal point. Once you have the foreground and backgrounds done you can work on the character itself. If the character you've chosen has something in their hand and they're holding if that is your focus then the actual character should be slightly out of focus, you have to be careful when dealing with the sharpness of your render since that's the star of the show, you don't want it to be overly sharp or overly blurry, but having varying degrees on your actual character will add another layer to your image.

In general text should go close to your focal point, the tendency to put text away from the focal creates competing focal points detracting from your character, put it too far away then your eye gets drawn to the text, put on the wrong place of your render then you have issues with looking cluttered finding just the right overlap for your text can certainly help add your signatures appearance and not just be a means to convey your username or some sort of quote.

I like a widescreen border myself like Vestige appears to, but I'd advise against using it as means for your text, perhaps at most you can put "by Lon'kill" or whatever signature you want in the corner so you don't have to use a watermark on your sig whilst still letting people know you made it yourself. I use a 5 px sometimes 6 px width on the top and bottom usually anything wider than that tends to make the sig look 'off' IMO. Borders also help you when you want to create a pop-out effect, the border clearly defines the end of the canvas so anything outside of that border just 'pops' a little more and can help give the impression it's extending outside the "intended" canvas.