I’ve been working on using Gimp to make cover art for a pair of my short stories that I intend to publish soon.  I’ve never used Gimp or Photoshop before, but I had a copy of Gimp that I downloaded when a friend raved about how much she loved it. I found it quite difficult to get used to, frankly.  One of the hardest things I’ve had to learn is how to move the piece that you want to move, instead of moving the background.

I started with the photo of the flowers. It doesn’t have much to do with the story, but I own the rights to this photo, and it’s pretty and eye-catching.  I tried to use the gimp word tools to add the words, but they didn’t have enough options, so instead I did it in Powerpoint and copied and pasted it over.  My husband had to give me a tutorial to help me figure out the scaling, but I think I’ve got it now.

The first version of this didn’t have the black, just the white text.  I looked at some other book covers, and thought that having a dark stripe behind the text would bring it to the fore a little better.  Instead of making it solid black, I used the transparency feature at 71%.  In my opinion, the transparency feature is the number one thing that makes Gimp (and other similar programs) worth using.  You just can’t get the same overlapping layered effect using physical media.  Not really.

The short story pair is up on Smashwords right now.  It’s currently 99 cents.  Here’s the link to download it.

“Emily’s Fifth Birthday” & “Alternative Medicine”

And here’s the Kindle Link:

Kindle Version

I made a new silkscreen of a nearly identical crow this week.  Today I silkscreened them on to my remaining tee shirts. I think I have a lot of tee shirts.  After this, I was supposed to iron them for 3-5 minutes on each side to set the ink.  This ended up kind of scorching the fabric.  Instead, I put them in the craft oven at about 275 for ten minutes. Still smelled a little scorched (like a high-heat dryer) but I hope it set the ink.

The photo on this didnt’ turn out as well as I had hoped, but it was either take a crappy photo or not get it photographed at all, because I’m using my table for another project.  This plate is actually twice as large as the others, because I used a larger meat tray.

After I stamped the image, the second step was to cut them out and lay them gently into styrofoam meat trays.  I pushed the clay into the corner to get a neat shape, and then trimmed the edges.  I’ve done a lot of these. It’s not as easy as it looks.  The less you touch the clay, the better it looks.

I’ve resisted using rubber stamps in my pottery before, preferring the ones I’ve made myself out of bisqued clay, but I shouldn’t have. Rubber stamps are available in so many different designs, and there are things you can do with stamps that you can’t do with any other tool.