Hello,

Today i'll be showing you how to make vectors, or tribals using gimp. The tools i'll be showing you to use will be the pencil, and pathtool. But to let you know, if you use the pencil tool, it will come out pixelly, using the brush tool makes it smooth, but requires more time to fill in.

1. First thing you want to do is go to gimp, and select your pencil tool (or brush)
red circle : the pencil tool
the arrow : adjust the size of the pencil to be as small, or large as you want, if you want a very sharp vector, go as small as possible.



2. Next what you are going to need to do is go to your pen tool, and get ready to make your design.
Red circle : the pathtool.


3. Next, you will make your design with the pathtool, to do so, you click on your canvas (drawing area) and make your design, if you click on one dot, then click to make another, a line is formed, you can use this to make shapes.
red circle : the dots that you create by clicking, you can also click on the dots and move them around to edit the design. (second picture now) That is a handle, you can click and drag to help edit the line, and bend it.
red arrow : you can click and drag the line made to bend it. (second picture now) The line being bent after dragging it.


4. Now, here comes one of the more important parts, making your design, well, turn into a drawing! What you want to do now is go down to your tool options (normally used to adjust the size of the pencil or brush) And click on 'stroke path' while still using the path tool. Then go into the window that has just opened and click on 'stroke with paint tool' And select the pencil tool (or brush if you are using it) Then click 'stroke'



5. Now, with that done, your design will now be on the canvas, in the color that you used, along with being stroked with the tool you have used.





That is it really, this can also be used to create tribal designs, or stroke in other ways using different tools. All you have to do after that is fill in the design with the bucket tool. If you are using photoshop you can just use the 'fill path' function, which automatically does this.

Using this, you can make things like this :


credits to jinx for this:

A pretty nice tut Bio.
You could add some examples tough...

+rep etc.

I'll be doing some vector heads today and showing the flats and stuff on how it can be used.

thx alt man i was hoping on learning how to do vectors

Got one example of something you can do using this, i'll make a knight example next.

Why are you stroking with the pencil?
It would be more of a vector if you were to simply fill the path (Or ofc use a vector mask), I have no idea what gimp has, but I guess if there is no option to go straight to that, you could just choose select path and then fill it with the bucket tool.
It should look more anti aliased then, assuming gimp automatically anti aliases its selections, like photoshop.

It doesn't do either of those. Gimp is pretty basic, if you want to AA you have to go to filters>enhance>AA

And i did mention that you have to fill it since gimp doesn't have a fill path tool, and photoshop does (also mentioned in the tutorial)

It does have a fill selection tool. You have to hit selection from path right above stroke, then just use a paint bucket. Also, the edges are anti-alaised

/offtopic Bio have you always made sets like this? I never noticed pixely edges on your art/tribal sets before.

Yes i have always done it likes this, you never notice because i make it in 256 :P

Ah...

Start doing it the other way then! (I say this because I think I may have not been clear in the above post)