GIMP How? The S. John Ross Woodcut technique

[Coyotemax]

I'm not so familiar with Gimp, but what he's doing is starting off as a greyscale file, and the "bitmap" occurs in the conversion menu (from greyscale to colour). In photoshop, typically I'm converting to RGB colour, but there are other options available. maybe that will help you track it down..

[msa]

I've tried to find the tools that make that process work in GIMP, but I haven't. That doesn't mean its not there... just that I wasn't smart enough to find it. You can accomplish something similar through this process:

1. Fill the background with the woodcut water pattern
2. Select the body of water
3. Shrink it by X pixels and feather it 2X pixels (or less than 2X to taste)
4. Fill the feathered selection with white (make sure the 'fill entire selection' box is checked)
5. Gaussian blur by 5 or so pixels
6. Use the threshold or curves menus to turn the blurry lines into tapered ones

Its not as pretty, and takes a lot of fidgeting. There may also be a better way. Hopefully RobA will drop by and enlighten all of us, so keep up with this thread!