Mark's Quick Gimp Tip

Just the other day in the area I live, thunder and lightning accompanied a snowstorm. This reminded me of a blog post I did about protecting your system in a lightning storm. It also reminded me of how I created a Lightning bolt. I needed an image for the post, and quickly turned to The Gimp to create it. And it was easy! The great thing about Gimp are the many plugins available, not only in the PCLinuxOS repository, but on the web.

For this project, I went to Deviant Art and downloaded lighting brushes for Gimp. You can get those here. Extract the file and drop it into your /.gimp/brushes folder. Then, Open Gimp, select the brush tool, scroll down the brush tool menu and select a lighting bolt. Adjust the color and size and click the mouse on your canvass. You've just created a lighting bolt! Use a dark solid color as a background so the lighting effect stands out. For added effect, I used a dark gradient.

Get PCLinuxOS, Get Gimp, get creative!