A painting lesson with Gimp. We will take an angelic picture and by the way of the painting tools will reveal her real self.

Open our angel-like image with Gimp:

Use the burn tool (the tool we will use the most here).
Work at a high zoom level, as we have to cover small details. Make half of the figure darker:

And make half of the figure darker, just like a devil. Back at 100% zoom it should be like:

Now switch to the paint brush tool
And draw a brown horn and a dark violet wing for a complete devil. Make the shape rough, we don't need many details at this point.

Again with the burn tool, trace the edges of the horn and wing:

And in subsequent moves, more and more aggressive, to enhance the 3D appearance:

At 100% zoom level it should be like this:

Now let's draw a dark background. Use a large brush and paint a rough background in a very dark red:

With a smaller brush go as close to the edges as you can. It does not have to be perfect:

Use the Smear tool, with a small brush and make the edges smooth and erase all the remaining white pixels:

At 100% zoom it should be like:
If needed (and here was needed) crop the image to have it balanced:

Optionally, use the burn tool again, with a big brush, in successive passes, to make the dark background darker, but keeping an aura around our subject:

The end result should be like:


If you identify yourself with the subject, then good work, you did your job well. If not, go to http://profiles.yahoo.com/yourusername (where yourusername is the ID you use for Yahoo Mail/Yahoo Messenger) and see it it say something to you. If don't. then you are not the target audience for this lesson.