Now that we have the basic linen cover in place, it's time to put some ornaments onto it. We're going to use the "Bump Map" filter that GIMP provides.
A bump map is (in theory) a very simple thing. Imagine you have a flat, plain surface of one single color. You also have a big, metal stamp, with a figure carved into it. Now smash the stamp on top of the surface, and you will indent the figure into it. You can use it like that, but you can also turn the surface over, and you'll have a raised figure. Basically, that's all a bump map is: it's a black and white stamp to indent or raise patterns on a surface.
Of course, this will look different on different surfaces; if you use a leather textured surface, or an almost plain color, you can indent or raise a pattern and it will look good. However, on a linen cover, indenting a pattern doesn't look very good because it's not really logical. If you raise the pattern, the structure of the cover will make it look like the pattern is embroided on top of the cover, which does look good (and logical).
You can use any pattern, but we're going to use a somewhat classic/antique ornament. I could just give you a complete ornament to download, but I won't do that. We're going to find a free one and create our own, based on that one. This makes sure that I can show you some more tools GIMP has to offer.
Getting the ornament
An ornament is also often called a flourish. There are many free ornaments to be found on the internet. Just type something like "Free ornaments" or "Free Flourishes" into Google, and you will find a gigantic number of them. I've selected one for this tutorial. It was downloaded from this site:
http://www.vectorian.net/free-vintage-vectors.html
It is included in the attachments of this post as FreeVintageOrnaments.zip.
Download FreeVintageOrnaments.zip from this post, and put it onto your desktop.
Extract the file in the ZIP-archive in your preferred manner.
The file that is extracted is called FreeVintageOrnaments.eps.
Explanation: Vector graphics
EPS stands for Encapsulated PostScript. This is a vector image. PostScript is a way to describe how the print on a page should look: it is a vector language. Vector graphics work completely different from the way GIMP works; GIMP is a raster graphics program. The difference is this.
When you draw a circle in GIMP, with a radius of 100 pixels, it will be fixed. If you make the document larger or smaller, the circle needs to be resized, which deteriorates the image quality, especially if you resize the document to be bigger. The circle will become blurry. Also, if the circle is not on its own layer, its position is fixed, its color is fixed... everything is fixed, and if you try to change it, the quality will become bad.
Vector graphcs work differently: if you draw a circle in a vector graphics program, what actually happens is this: you tell the program: "Draw me a cricle. Put it at coördinates (X,Y), and give the circle a radius of 100 pixels. Use a green pen of thickness 4."
See the difference? GIMP knows nothing besides the colors of pixels after it draws a circle, but a vector program (such as Inkscape, or Illustrator) knows everything. "There's a point at (X,Y), from which a circle was created with radius 100, a green pen, and line thickness 4."
So, if you resize the document and make it 20% bigger, the program will
redraw the circle proportionally bigger, and move it to the correct coordinates to keep the position within the bigger document correct. Note that I said
redraw, and not [b]resize[b]. Because the circle is redrawn from scratch, it will not lose quaity.
And there we have it: EPS is a way to save these kinds of vector graphics.
So, how do we use vector graphics in a program such as GIMP that can normally not use them? There is a way to open EPS files in GIMP, telling it how to has to draw them. This is called rendering. GIMP renders the file
once, at the time you open it, using your supplied parameters, and the render will end up as fixed raster image. If you want a bigger render, or a smaller one, without losing quality, you will need to re-open the image, and have GIMP render it again with different parameters.