I finally semi-uncovered the secrets of Gimp. Voila!

After months of watching people upload amazing photos with digital coloring and many fruitless attempts at getting GIMP to work for me, I finally sorta figured our how to use it. Reviews would be appreciated.


This whole entire picture was done on GIMP, drawing and all on a laptop with no mouse. I feel semi-accomplished. Hopefully, this won't be the first and last decent GIMP picture I produce.

I have to say, this is really impressive for having drawn this on your laptop touchpad! Really, I can only imagine how tough it was to get the curve of the eyelashes and stuff xD. I think it's awesome!

I'm not quite sure if you were going for a realistic style or a manga style, and that's my only critique. If you were going for a realistic eye, I would say look up a reference and really focus on getting the eye shape right on. Right now it looks a little oblong and the colors should be a little softer, not so much solid black outline and electric blue iris.
But if you were going for a manga look, I would say this is a lot closer to perfection since those could all be style choices.

Another small comment is that I think the white part of the eye is too blank; it shouldn't be just solid white. There needs to be just a tad of shading in there. If you look at manga pics you might notice that the top half of the eye is a little darker than the bottom. I trick I do is create a new layer, set to multiply, and then take the airbrush tool and brush on some gray to the top part of the eye. This creates a bit of a shadow. Then, you add your highlights on top of that layer, and that really makes them pop. It can be hard to explain in words, but if you look up tutorials on youtube you might be able to see what I mean.

Awesome job! Hope I helped!

Good really good. What I found cool are the eyelashes....how did you do it...would really like to know anyway good work and keep trying to do more better!