How To Make A User Bar With Gimp

One Of My Examples:

Difficulty: Not too hard but you need to pay attention lol.

Things you need:
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Visitor Font: http://www.dafont.com/search.php?psize=m&q=visitor+font
Gimp 2.6: http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

Before we start getting into making the userbar your going to need to make a scan line pattern to make the userbar look more unique.

So to get started with the scan line pattern, you have to press Ctrl+N. Set the size as 6 width by 6 height. Also go into the advanced options and set the 'Fill With' drop down box with Transparency. It should look a little bit like this now.



Now I know what your thinking. Thats way too small. Your correct we now have to zoom in on it so we can work on it. Go to View>Zoom 100%>16:1 (1600%). If you did that correctly it should look like this.



Now we can work on it. We then have to use the paintbrush tool. Be sure that the paintbrush set is Circle (01). You must make your picture look the same as this.



Now that we have the pattern done we need to save it as a .pat file. Go to File>Save As...>Rename it Scanlines.pat and go to wherever you downloaded gimp. It should be called something like GIMP-2.0. So your going to now go to the file called share then to gimp then go into the file 2.0 and you should find a file called Patterns. Save your pattern into that file and you should then have your pattern set in Gimp. (Note you need to close Gimp and bring it back up for the pattern to show up in your patterns.)


Alright now that we have the pattern ready for usage, we can begin to make our userbar.

Step 1: Go into Gimp and press Ctrl+N. Now set your backround size to 350 x 19. If you've done that correctly you should have this.



Step 2: We want some nice colors for our userbar. In this case I picked purple and light purple. (You can pick any colors you want.) Now to use these colors combined we want to use the gradient button . Make sure your gradient is FG to BG . Now hold the Ctrl key and drag a straight line horizontally across your userbar. You should have something alittle bit like this.



Step 3: Now we are putting our scan lines on. Press your Bucket Fill Button . Now set your fill type to pattern, and underneath that you can choose whichever pattern you'd like, but in this case its going to be your scan lines. So your settings should look like this.



We now got to fill the userbar with this pattern. We need to make a new layer. So press the buttons Shift+Ctrl+N and it will create a new layer. Now that we have the new layer use your bucket fill button to fill the layer with your pattern. Your userbar should now look alittle bit like this.



Step 4: We now want to put a nice render on it so its more 'stylish' perhaps? Now you might be asking what a render is. Its simply a picture that goes onto your backround. So grab a picture with transparency on it and paste it on to your userbar. Im going to use a runescape logo. If your picture is too big or too small you can fix that with the Scale/Resize Tool . You can also move your render around with the Move Tool . So once your done messing around with renders and such your userbar should look something like this only with a diffrent render and maybe diffrent colors in your backround.

.

Step 5: Now that we have a simple render on our userbar we want to have some sort of text. The font needed is Visitor Font, Size 10, Color is white. Move it to where ever you want it to be. It should look alittle bit something like this.



But we aren't done yet. press the buttons Ctrl+L to bring up your layers menu, and right click the text that you just put in and press Alpha to selection. Your text should now be selected.



Now click select >grow and set it to grow 1 pixel. Now create a new layer again by pressing Shift+Ctrl+N. Make sure you have your new layer selected on your layers menu and then fill the selection with the color black. (Make sure your settings are back to normal) . Your userbar should look like this now.



Now go back to your layers menu and drag your new layer below your text.


Then go to select > none and your userbar should be complete. File>Save As..

Finished Product:

Tip: If gimp saved your userbar as a XCF file then just save as again and put .png, .bmp, .jpg at the end of your custom title. I recommend .png for good photo quality.

This isn't my best that I have made and I left one thing out that you dont really need. If you want to you can use the Ellipse Select Tool . I recommend putting it like this.



Now that you have that just use the gradient tool set it to FG To Transparent and make sure your color is White.



Hold Ctrl button and make a little vertical line in the center of the ellipse you made on your userbar and it should look like this.



Finished Product (If you used the Ellipse Select Tool):



Hope this helped and good luck with future userbars.

Credits: 100% Me

Nicely done Tyler, GIMP is the shit. Your tutorials have gotten a lot better, this is to a much higher standard.

Ty and yeah Gimp is GOD lol. Yeah I spend more time on my tuts and try to explain it to the fullest extent and give a lot of visuals so people know what i'm talking about cause I know I got confused about doing this stuff lol.