excited
reggietate for helping me with that), and it has eaten the entire rest of the day once I started playing with it. My main reason for wanting it was I've been trying to make myself a few icons recently, and I've discovered that, especially when text is involved, they tend to look a bit blurred (I was previously using Microsoft Picture Manager, and Paint, so pretty basic stuff, really).
Admittedly graphics aren't really my strong point, and I'm sure I've only scratched the surface of what GIMP can do, but I thought I'd share the fruits of my first day's work, as I'm surprisingly pleased with them.
Here's the first attempt. I decided it looked a pale and washed out, though. 
So I played around with the colour and contrast a bit. Better, but I still wasn't happy about that band of white at the top of the picture, no matter how much I smudged it. 
This is the final version. I finally worked out how to do a big block of colour as similar as possible to the background colour, and then smudged it to blend with the real background. It's not perfect, and I think I missed a teeny bit of white around the edges, and the blend isn't great, but I didn't think it was bad for a first day. Here's the second set of icons I made today. This one was fun, it involved layers! Three of them, no less! (yeah, I know, the GIMP veterans are rolling their eyes at this point, but humour me, I'm excited about this :-))
The third one doesn't really work because the text is too small, and I possibly need to sharpen the second and third ones a bit more. Also, I was aiming for a dark red smokey background but it's come out more pink than I expected. But apart from that, I was reasonbly pleased.
The main thing is, I've now figured out a lot of the basics to be able to do what I want to do with images. I suppose now it's just a matter of practice, and working out quicker/easier ways of doing it, and applying other functions to get better results.
Yey! *iz happy*
