Follow these steps and you can have a wonderful star rank like this one:

1)If you do not have the star brush set on your GIMP go to deviantART and pick which one you want to use. Installation is easy.
2)Open up GIMP and create new. Make the size 900x900. (My starts out with the background being transparent, so you'll need to make your background transparent as well.)
3)You should be already set to use the brush, so go over to the where it has this circle in black:
Change where it has a circle to the star like this one here:
4)Now change the color from black to white/ffffff.
5)Bring the brush pixel size to 10.00.
6)Now try to center it as best as you can and click to make the star shape.
7)Now that that is done you need to go and pick to colors to gradient it to give it a better look. For this one I am using 4080b0 for the top of the star and 005a9f for the bottom of the star. Your color fields should look like this:
8)Now you click on the gradient button which will look like this after you click on it:
9)Make sure your gradient is set to Darken Only before you gradient it.
10)Drag you gradient pointer from the top of the white star to the bottom of the white star. It will look something like this once that is done:
11)Now we go and click on the Ellipse Select Tool and create a circle around the how thing. The Ellipse Select Tool will look like this:
12)Now we move the Ellipse circle to the top right corner of the star.
13)Now hint the dodge/burn tool and keeps it on dodge and then select Shadows from the other one. This is what you should have so far:
14) After you have done that repeat, but instead of using Shadows this time use Midtones. This should be what you have so far:
15)Now that you have added gloss to it it is time to resize it to the size you want. I'll be resizing it to 15x15.By doing this you go to Layer - Scale Layer.
16)Now you cut the star out of the old lay and close it. Then you paste it to GIMP which will automatic a new window for you. Now all you have to do is hit save and come up with a name for it.

Your star should look something like the one at the top now.

I would like to see how well my tut helped you, so please post your images up.

Edit: This is for those that don't know how to install a brush to show how easy it is.

You have to have them out of the zip file to do this. You need to have a folder open up. You then type in the following:
C:\Program Files\GIMP-2.0\share\gimp\2.0\brushes and move the brushes to the folder. If you have GIMP on click on where you change the brush style at and it the refresh icon and then the brushes you have install will appear.

Like I said. Very easy.


Last Edit: Jul 3, 2009 21:25:02 GMT by Jesse