Filling in the Details

You are constantly picking different colors and different hues of a color to add details to your painting. More detail can be added to the painting by using the paintbrush tool. GIMP provides the following three paint tools to make your life easier:

• Smudge: Blends colors
• Blur/Sharpen: Refines the depth of objects
• Dodge/Burn: Darkens colors or adds highlights

Blending Colors

You started adding colors in the “Coloring your Sketch” exercise.

For the refining task of the sketch you need to know which tools to use to blend colors together. For this task the smudge tool and the blur/sharpen tool can be used. Both tools allow blending colors in a different manner (see Figure 8-51).

Figure 8-51. Illustration of using the blur tool (left) and the smudge tool (right). The blur tool only blurs the edges of a spot until a maximum, whereas you can smudge edges continuously.