Fun with Gimp: Start with your hand drawn art and apply filters to make something new

For years I got to use Adobe products at work and fell in love with Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Illustrator and I dream of someday owning the whole Adobe Creative Suite at home. When that happens I also hope to be able to afford all the Ikea studio furniture I want including lamps and a new house with a sunny studio overlooking a beautiful mountain scene.... Yes, I have some ideas of what heaven might be like whenever I get there.

But right now the pricetag is a little steep and we have other priorities for our spending money. Thank goodness for freeware. For about a year I have been discovering the pleasures of Gimp, an image editing program comparable to Photoshop, and am still exploring its amazing capabilities. Best of all it's FREE.

At first I just used Gimp to crop and sharpen up my photographs, but lately I have been discovering its art potential. The only only problem is that once I start playing with it I can sucked into into vortex for hours. Here's an example of the fun you can have with Gimp.....

I drew this lady (I think she must a teacher) with markers and color pencil on a Post-it, and scanned it to a digital image:

Then I used Gimp tools to make her sharper and brighter and applied a filter called Selective Gaussian Blur to make her skin nice and smooth:

Then I got a crazy and applied another filter. (Gimp has 16 types of filters, each with different options and then options within the options.)  The filter I used for this picture is called Polar Coordinates, found in the Distorts menu:

I like how the window appears in her head, a metaphor for thinking of new ideas perhaps. How many software programs can give you visual metaphors you weren't even looking for? Just part of of the serendipity of doing art.