Creating a stickynote with GIMP

Creating a stickynote with GIMP

04 Jan 2009 / Uncategorized 1 Comment

In this little tutorial I’ll take you step by step through creating a sticky note.

Finished product:

Let’s begin.

First of all, create a new image (Preferably a little larger than the size of your sticky note, just so you have a little working room). I’m creating mine at 128×128.

Then, if you don’t have the layers and paths window open, you will need to. Go to Windows->Layers,Channels,Paths… A new window will pop up.

Now select the paths tool. Here’s the icon:

What we must do next is to create points so we can make a nice, smooth, outline for the stickynote. Dealing with the paths tool can be pretty confusing, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. Considering many of you readers may be new to GIMP, or just the paths tool, I will go into a bit of detail on how to handle it.

Placing points
Click in one of the corners of your image with the paths tool created. A circle will appear. Click the mouse again somewhere else, and other circle will appear and so on and so forth.

Deleting points
Made a mistake? Well, click the point and press the backspace button to delete it. Oddly enough, the delete key doesn’t work.

Moving points
Of course you’re going to mess up or at least want to tweak the position of the points you place. To move a point, first select the paths tool then move the mouse to a middle of a point (the circle). Then click and drag it. You’ll know it’s ready to move the point when you see the standard arrowed cross in the top right corner of your mouse. ** Don’t forget: If you move points before finishing the design, you may want to change which point is selected. After all, when you left click again it creates a point stemming from the currently selected point.

Curving
This is pretty hard to do unless you create a new point for the sole purpose of being curved. To create a point with an associated curve, click and drag the mouse instead of just clicking. It takes a bit of moving to get the desired curve. Look at the diagram below. The box labeled 1 is what controls the curve. Move that box or the point to alter the curve.

The box labeled 2 will not affect the curve.

Finishing (Connecting beginning and ending points)
Make sure you have the last point selected (the one you want to connect to the other end). Then hover your mouse over the other end point, hold control, and click. Tada!

Finished making the outline for your stickynote? Here’s what my outline looks, just for a guideline in case you’re stuck and can’t figure out how you want yours to look:

Now we need to turn that into a selection, because we can’t do much with it as a path. In the Layers, Channels, and Paths window which we may or may not have opened at the beginning of this post, click on the 3rd tab.

Then click on the path that you want to make a selection (Unnamed, usually. May be Unnamed#1, etc, if you had trouble with the thing). Then right click it, and click “Path to selection”.

Alright now if you’ve used any image editing software before, you know how to deal with selections. Now you can put a gradient/solid color etc inside the selection. I decided to go with a 2 color gradient. The colors are: ffde6d and ffe58c.

With the selection still active, click the first tab in the Layers,Chan,Paths window to go back to the layers. Then create a new layer. This step is optional, to add some shading. Icon:

Now, change the foreground color to something a bit darker, like efc944. Next, scroll down on your tools window at the bottom to reveal more options. Change the pressure to something low, I used 4.0. Next select a the size 9 fuzzy brush. Then, with the new layer selected, shade around the edges or wherever you feel like shading. If it’s too dark, simply change the opacity of the layer. Mine came out dark so I changed the opacity to 45 and it looked nice.

Yay! We’re done! Viner hand size 12 font is a good font to use.

Posted by Matt @ 12:46 pm

Tags: GIMP, stickynote