This is a great tutorial, no doubt. I'm having a problem, though. Being a complete newbie at graphics I can follow the steps closely (that's difficult enough, already!), but more often than not I have no idea what I'm actually doing. This makes adjusting the steps to suit my own needs very hard.
Does anyone know of an intermediate but general GIMP tutorial? I know about basic procedures, using brushes, selection, copy-paste and all that, but an "alpha layer", the settings to most filters (and what the filters actually do), a floating layer etc. are quite a mystery to me.