Piczo

Alright... Just like signatures, there are a variety of different ways of creating avatars, as seen below:

Well, just so you know, I personally liked the fourth one the best, and I didn't really like the second and third ones that much... The first one was nice and plain, and I liked that one, too. And if you actually are that desperate, you can use them, but only if you give credit. I'm tracking it to see if you're giving credit or not. I'll write an avatar tutorial, but this is going to be so simple that it's not funny – and plus, we'll be using other images. So basically, it's not 100% GIMP-made, unlike those four ones I made above (yes, I made them from scratch). If you just wanted to know, here are the vague tools that I used to create them:

First: I didn't really use a filter for this... I made the checker background by doing four by four squares with a dark and light purple, then I made a white fade from top to middle, then bottom to middle (I used the foreground to transparent gradient). Those swirls are actual Edwardian Script ITC-font 'E's, which I think I made around 90 with a white color. Those little circles are the Sparks brushes. I made the spacing to like... I dunno. I think it was 116 or something.

Second: I made a cyan-blue and light-blue-green gradient with the light-blue-green on the top. I made scanlines and rotated them around the corners, and then I used the path tool to make a diamond in the middle; in it, I put a radial gradient (foreground to transparent) of cyan-blue, light-blue-green, blue and dark-ish green, and then I used the Polar Coords filter, and that's how I got that moon-looking thing in the corner... I used a Cubism filter on the background to make it all square.

Third: I got a Rose fractal, desaturated it and adjusted the brightness to make it brighter; then I used the IWarp filter with a deform radius at 30 at Swirl CCW. Then I kept duplicating the later and changing the color of each later. For the small red one in the middle, I used the scale tool and moved it to the middle.

Fourth: I used a Qbist to get the corner thing; then I desaturated, duplicated it and rotated it 180º. Then I set the bottom-right corner thing's color to cyan-blue, and the top-left corner thing's color to yellow-green, and it magically turned out like that... Can't remember what else I did – sorry... Oh, wait! I think I remember! Those swirls are actually Edwardian Script ITC 'E's, once again. The circles are the sparks brushes. Repetitive, aren't I?

Well, peoples, I hope you actually try to make some of these signatures – just experiment around with things. That's how I got those avatars, really. Anyway, let me get stuck into this tutorial. I just made it really simple and using other pictures because it's just easier that way.

Before we start, I want you to find a nice, small background that's either 100 by 100 pixels or larger; it can be any color, really. I'll be using this image:



Step 1: Make your image a square, but scaling and cropping. I'm not going to go through the process for you, but if you're so badly dying to know how, then just contact me by clicking here – but if you're going to contact me, then please tell me the dimensions of your image! I ended up with this:



Step 2 Now you just add your text, and you're all good to go! This is what I ended up with:



I know, right? It's just so simple. Well, maybe when I'm not feeling lazy, I'll put up some better tutorials for avatars. Because, I mean, GIMP isn't meant to be used for such basic avatars like the one I just made – that sort of stuff should be for Microsoft Paint or something. Seriously.