Nicu's How-to

Waterdrops with Inkscape

Made with: Inkscape
Date: 2012

Tutorial for creating water drops with Inkscape.

Inkscape calendar layout

Made with: Inkscape
Date: 2012

A page layout tutorial for photo calendars made with Inkscape.

Custom grids with GIMP

Made with: GIMP
Date: 2012

Creating custom image grids and layouts with GIMP.

GIMP Watermark removal

Made with: GIMP
Date: 2012

Remove unwanted image watermarks with GIMP.

Demotivational Posters with GIMP

Made with: GIMP
Date: 2011

Create funny demotivational posters with GIMP.

Hyperspace comic

Made with: Inkscape GIMP
Date: 2010

Tutorial for drawing a spaceship jumping into hyperspace with Inkscape and GIMP

NASA mission styled badges with Inkscape

Made with: Inkscape
Date: 2010

Use Inkscape to create a Fedora themed badge.

Drawing a rocket with Inkscape is not rocket science

Made with: Inkscape
Date: 2010

Tutorial for a simple and funny rocket with Inkscape.

Box of Eyes (GIMP)

Made with: GIMP
Date: 2009

Map images to a box with GIMP to get an interesting effect for eye display.

Digital photography

Made with: [digital camera]
Date: 2009

Collection of digital photography articles, tutorials and tips.

From photos to comic strips with GIMP and Inkscape

Made with: GIMP Inkscape
Date: 2009

An exploration for easy comic strip made from photos with GIMP and Inkscape

Webcomic cartoon titles with Inkscape

Made with: Inkscape
Date: 2008

Tutorial for creating a cartoon-ish webcomic title ftext effect with Inkscape.

Steampunk photography with GIMP

Made with: GIMP
Date: 2008

Make a photography look old, like XIX century (I like to call that steampunk) with GIMP.

Drawing gears in Inkscape

Made with: Inkscape
Date: 2008

Use Inkscape to draw complex gears and color them in various ways

Turn a digital photo into Polaroid with GIMP

Made with: the GIMP
Date: 2008

Transform a plain and boring digital photo in a realistic Polaroid with this cool GIMP trick.

Pac-Man baddies with Inkscape

Made with: Inkscape
Date: 2008

Tutorial for drawing Pac-Man baddies (bad guys and girls) with Inkscape.

How it's made: create a RPG map element with Inkscape

Made with: Inkscape
Date: 2008

Illustration of my Inkscape workflow used to create the RPG tileset clipart pack.

Portrait touch-up with GIMP

Made with: GIMP
Date: 2007

A few simple techniques to improve a digital photo using GIMP. Among other, a couple of new features introduced in the new GIMP 2.4, the Healing Tool and the Red Eye Removal filter, but also the classic color curves and levels, cropping, teeh whitening, blur overlays and more.

3D text with Inkscape using Blur

Made with: Inkscape
Date: 2007

Create glass-like effects using transparency, shadows and masks with Inkscape.

Fun with glass and shadows in Inkscape

Made with: Inkscape
Date: 2007

Tutorial showing how to make a 3D text (relief) in the style of the Google logo using mostly the SVG Gaussian Blur filter.

A fair look at the SIOX tool in Inkscape 0.46 and GIMP 2.4

Made with: Inkscape , the GIMP
Date: 2007

The foreground extraction tool based on the SIOX algorithm can be found in Inkscape and GIMP, here is a quick but fair look at how it work there.

Postage stamps with Inkscape

Made with: Inkscape
Date: 2007

Use Inkscape to create postage stamps, with perforated borders and colorful pictures.

Indexing PNGs to reduce the file size

Made with: The GIMP
Date: 2007

Reducing the file size for PNG images used on the web by converting them with GIMP from true to indexed colors.

Reflecting images on surfaces with Inkscape and GIMP

Made with: Inkscape , The GIMP
Date: 2007

A trick abused often: take an image and create its reflection on a surface to obtain a kind of perspective effect with Inkscape and GIMP.

The ultimate guide for creating shiny web buttons with Inkscape

Made with: Inkscape
Date: 2007

Tutorial for creating all kinds of shiny web buttons with Inkscape: simple, 3D, aqua, glossy, crystal, liquid, gel, with and without shadows and for various states.

Shiny arrows with Inkscape

Made with: Inkscape
Date: 2007

Draw simple but shiny arrows and buttons with Inkscape.

Draw people faces with Inkscape

Made with: Inkscape
Date: 2007

Learn how to draw people faces with Inkscape even if you don't know how to draw using a photo as reference material.

Rain animation with GIMP

Made with: GIMP
Date: 2007

Create a fake a rain animation effect with GIMP.

Rubber Stamp with Inkscape

Made with: Inkscape
Date: 2007

In the referendum for impeachment of the Romanian President on 19 May 2007 I voted "NO" to the impeachment and NO to the restoration of the communist mafia, also known as patrulaterul maro or the 322. This short tutorial is made in support of that vote.

Tips for using brushes in Inkscape

Made with: Inkscape
Date: 2007

Follow-up to Máirín's nice tutorial about Grungy Brushes, published on the Red Hat Magazine.

Tips for creating "grungy" GIMP brushes with Inkscape

Made with: Inkscape
Date: 2007

Follow-up to Máirín's nice tutorial about Grungy Brushes, published on the Red Hat Magazine. Covers only part of the workflow.

How to use Inkscape's new blur filter

Made with: Inkscape
Date: 2007

This article about creating orbs and 3D text with Inkscape was orginally written for the Red Hat Magazine but after the needed number of months have passed, it is free to re-publish anywhere.

Transform a photo in a Jigsaw Puzzle board

Made with: GIMP , Inkscape
Date: 2007

Break a photo in Jigsaw Puzzle pieces, rotate and shuffle them.

GIMP trick: make your subject jump out of a photo

Made with: GIMP
Date: 2007

Take a photo and make it look like the subject is jumping out of the frame. This is a graphics heavy tutorial, using a lot of screenshots.
Adaptation after a Photoshop trick

Making a Hackergotchi (floating hacker head)

Made with: GIMP
Date: 2006

Hackergotchis or floating hacker heads are small pictures, usually of little disembodied heads used to represent the author in blog aggregators.
Originally written for Planet Fedora and published initially on Fedoraproject wiki.

Simplified Raster to SVG Conversion Tutorial

Made with: Inkscape
Date: 2006

Simplified way to trace cartoons in PNG format and get vector images as SVG.
Originally written for the Open Clip Art Library.

Drawing an Eye with OOo Draw

Made with: OpenOffice.org Draw
Date: 2004

Simple drawing of an eye using OpenOffice.org Draw.
Originally written for OOoAuthors.org.

Drawing a Tree with OOo Draw

Made with: OpenOffice.org Draw
Date: 2004

Simple drawing of a tree using OpenOffice.org Draw.
Originally written for OOoAuthors.org.

Drawing the Cooperative logo with OOo Draw

Made with: OpenOffice.org Draw , post-processed with GIMP
Date: 2004

At first, the OOoAuthors.org was called OOo Cooperative and this is a re-creation with Draw of the logo used at the time by the project.
Originally written for OOoAuthors.org.

Note: Some of the tutorials here have a Romanian translation.

Many thanks to my friends at OpenArt.ro, www.xdrive.ro and Inovatika for motivating me to start this sub-site.

The tutorials on this page are free, but if you find them entertaining, pretty please (this is not a requirement, only my humble wish) send an email to dioanad at server gmail.com with thanks for motivating me to publish them and expressing your unhappiness to the same person for destroying my motivation to publish even more.
Be nice, polite and do not do nasty things with the address above. Thank you.