My very good friend Angel suggested that I do a postcard from a disaster area in the style depicted here, and I thought it was a great challenge. In particular I imported the Greetings from Brigham Young University postcard on that linked Flickr page as a base. First I made the text layers in separate lines, to give more flexibility. I removed the text info from those layers so that I could manipulate them. I skewed and resized the text to emulate the style of the source material. I then used the resulting text to create a selection, which I converted to a channel, so that I could reuse it several times. I imported all the gulf disaster photos as layers. I used the selection channel to copy and paste a letter shaped part of each photo, erasing anything that overlapped where I did not want it to. I created a background with a solid field of blue with a single black application of a splatter brush. Finally, I used the channel based selection to create the black and white outlines around the letters (by increasing the selection size a bit for each) and the shadow behind the letters.
It kept me busy for a while, and was more involved than most of my work here, but it was a lot of fun, and I recommend trying something like it to appreciate the power of the GIMP, and the detailed work of the original, which I only began to approach.
tags: postcards, fun, disaster, BP, gulf, oil spill, politics, GPL, GNU, Open Source, GIMP, Creative Commons, CC-SA, free, lemasney, postaday2011, 365
