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The Hair Itself!
by HauntingKitten (check out her IMVU products here!)

(Note from DreamMint: the images for this tutorial were deleted from photobucket and since they weren't on my account I cannot restore them. But I've decided to leave the tutorial up anyway.)


First open up GIMP and go file and new then and change the image size to: width 128 and height 128 pixels. Press Ok and a tab will appear showing you that box size.
Now you need to decide what colour hair texture your wanting to make, you can make all different colours using this so it doesn’t matter. I’m going to take purple as my example. To choose a colour you simply click on the box on you GIMP tool panel as shown below. This will open up another tab so you can choose a basic colour and the make it lighter or darker by moving the arrows along the bars.



Once you’ve got a colour you like press ok and fill in the square with that colour. You can either do that by clicking the fill bucket on the GIMP tool bar (bucket icon) or simply press shift + B at the same time then click.

Ok now you need to select the paintbrush tool from the tool bar and once you’ve done that you need to select a big brush to use. You can do this by again double clicking ok the active brush option (seen in pic below) and choose the biggest brush.



Now go back to your colours (if you cant remember how see above), now click on the colour you just used to fill the box with (GIMP automatically saves the colour you’ve previously used so its not that hard to find ^^) Once you’ve done that click on you old colour and I generally use the value bar and move it so it is half way between your original colour and the end of the bar, (so you use a lighter shade of the colour)



Ok once that’s done we need to draw a line with the new colour across your filled box to get colour 1, then again move the arrow to the full length of the value box to get the colour 2 which can be seen below. (You draw straight lines by clicking where u want the line to start then press Shift)



Ok now come the fun part lol

Go to filters, along the top of the screen, then down to noise, then across so spread (seen in images) Ok now change the spear amount to as high as it can go, in this case it would be 128 by 128 and click ok.




Ok now your probably thinking what a mess right lol Go to filters again, this time down to Blur and across to motion blur. When the tab comes up set the type of motion blur to linear, the angle to 90 and any thing over 100 for the length and click ok.



Ok once that’s done it should look some thing like this …





This is your basic hair texture, you can use on hair BUT you may also want a shine on this now to make it look more realistic, so in theory more people will but it ^^


The Shine!

Ok now for the shine ^^ right click on your hair texture and go down to layer and ten new layer. Make sure it is set as the same width and height (128 x 128).



Now to view all the layers you have on a piece simply click on the File on your GIMP tool box down to dialogues and then onto layers and a box should upper showing you them. From this panel you can make it so your layers merge with one another, over lap each other and a lot of other things too. Select the new layer (highlights blue) and then do back to your colours and get a white. Now we are going to do exactly as we did before and place two white lines across the page like this...




(You may want to use a smaller brush than you did before to get a shine you like)


Now go back to filters, down to noise, across to spread again. This time change the amount to roughly 35 and press ok. Now again go back to filters down to blur then across to motion blur. Again make sure it’s a linear type and the angle it 90. As for the length put it up again about 35. Now it should look like this….



Ok one more step and your hair is done ^^

Go back to your layers tab and change the new layers mode to overlay so it should look like this….



That’s it ^^ now you just need to save it and put it on a piece of hair. Here is some pictures of hair I’ve dine in this way, including the texture I just made in the steps above.




The best way to get a hair texture you really like is just to have a mess around with colour, hope that’s cleared things up a bit ^^