Trying Something New

I've been using Microsoft Picture It! for all manner of photo manipulation and digital projects for 11 or 12 years.  There were so many things about it that I really liked.  Sadly it is no longer made and the version I have installed on my old desktop is not compatible with newer operating systems.  This has left me only able to work on certain projects when I'm tethered to the wall and then transfering them over to my new computer which I use for everything else.

A couple of weeks ago I downloaded Gimp, a free image manipulation software program.   I'd only fiddled with it slightly until Wednesday evening when I decided to dive in.  It's not quite as user friendly as I might like and it doesn't have all of the functionalities of Picture It! that I use regularly but after some trial and error I managed to complete the project below.  I was happily able to do a couple of things better than I could have in Picture It!

The project started with a drawing of me based on a photograph.  Then I scanned the drawing and imported into Gimp where I cut out just me.  I then layered that on top of the original photograph (which took a lot of work to line up) essentially replacing real me with cartoon me.  Then I painted myself (which would have worked a little better if I hadn't infilled some areas with pencil) and the image was complete.