HowTo: Create a brush-stroke-look in GIMP

For the making of the graphics for our new website, I've had to teach myself a few new techniques like the cool "grunge look" on websites these days. One cool effect is to make it look like someone used a paintbrush and you can still see the strokes with individual, dirty leftover lines from the brush's hair. I figured that text (yes, text!) has similar properties like a dirty brush - and this HowTo will show you how to transform a loosely formatted text into an awesome brush you can use in GIMP or whatever graphic tool you prefer.

This is the very first HowTo we're releasing on our XBloome website, but there's plenty of stuff we've figured out so far and would like to share with you. So if there's enough time, the number of tutorials and HowTos will hopefully increase!

So, here's how I did it.

Overview

Find some text
Copy/paste it into a WYSIWYG editor
Slightly change the formatting, so it looks less static
Import the formatted text in GIMP
Apply effects (motion blur, erode) for more "dirt"
Resize and export as brush

Step 1: Find and prepare the text

1) You can use any text you like. Even "lorem ipsum" if you want to. I've used parts of Drupal's installation notes.

2) Simply copy it into the clipboard:

3) Paste it into a WYSIWYG editor of your choice. I've used "OpenOffice.org writer".

4) There shouldn't bee too much text per line, so change the page size to A5 (Format > Page > Format = A5) and try to get about 10 words per line and between 10-12 lines of text at maximum.

5) Set the text alignment to "justified".

6) Make some text bold, resize some lines, and produce some "holes", using tabulator.
Just make it look a bit less static. My text looked like this:

7) Now export it as PDF.

Step 2: Import and prepare the text in GIMP

1) Open the PDF in GIMP like a regular image: File > Open

2) The default resolution is usually 100 dpi. Leave it like that and import the first page (Results in a 582 x 826 pixel image).

3) Crop the image to have only the text, using GIMP's autocrop feature: "Image > Autocrop Image"

Now, let's make it look a bit dirtier, and less readable:
4) Apply a motion blur: Filters > Blur > Motion Blur:

Blur Type: Linear
Length: 4
Angle: 50

5) Apply erode effect: Filters > Generic > Erode

6) Now resize the image to ~115 pixels width (or any other value, but that one turned out to work pretty good).

7) Change the color mode to grayscale: Image > Mode > Grayscale
Here's what the final brush graphic will look like:

Voila. That's it. You've got the brush graphics. Now, in order to use it in GIMP, you must continue with these last steps:
8) Save it as "GIMP Brush" file: File > Save as > "GIMP brush (*.gbr)"
9) The save dialog will ask for a name and "spacing" value. Choose a meaningful name, like "text stroke" and the default spacing value of 10 should be fine.
10) Copy the resulting .gbr file into GIMP's brush folder.
On a GNU/Linux system that would be something like: ~/.gimp-2.4/brushes/

Now, either close and re-open GIMP, or open the "Brushes" dialog (Dialogs > Brushes) and click the "refresh brushes" button.

What it looks like

Here's an example of a quick-n-dirty stroke-like painting:

On our website, I've used that brush to make the dirty looking, stroke-bleeding edges around the top image.
Here is how the image looked at the beginning:

And here is the result, after modifying the hard black edges in the layer mask with the text-stroke brush: