If you love printable projects in GIMP, you’ll definitely love this tutorial. It only requires patience and no super technical hacks to learn, that’s something to celebrate! So, sit back and enjoy this very easy but wonderful printable idea.

Text Art in GIMP

Open GIMP and create a new file. You can make one with a transparent background so you can save it and re-use. One thing to remember though, you need to make a square workspace.

First, think of whatever text you want for this project. Here we chose the word “hope”. Position the letters equally in such a way that the number of characters in the upper part is equal to those below. You may add other characters like emoji to make it equal. Another great idea is to use a name like Jane or John. The possibilities are endless!

Get the Text Tool and Type in the First letter. We want to make the second letter a little different so we will type it separately. So with the Third and Fourth letters.

Note: we used a guide here just to make sure the letters are symmetrically placed.

Now, we want to make the “O” in hope stand out. Change the color of the text into something lighter then rotate it a bit just like it’s in italics.

We can add in more positive thoughts texts or just one text like a name or nickname. Use different font styles and sizes but make sure you stay along the edges of the “O”.

Once you’ve completely covered all the parts of the letter, remove the big “O” layer by clicking on the Eye icon on the layers panel

You can spruce this piece of art a bit by changing the colors of the other letters.

Save the file and print to frame it or make it like a big poster. And if you’re a scrapbook designer, you can also do this technique when making a word art element, just save it as PNG with a transparent background.

That’s it and you have a new masterpiece!

Here is what’s new in July!

Learn more about the things we added for July here.