How do you animate an avatar in GIMP?

How do you make an avatar on GIMP?

• All I wanna do is take a picture of mine, write words on it, give it a cool border (maybe animate it) and save it. How do you do that? I haven't found a good site to help me.

• Answer:

  Look through this page: http://www.gimp-tutorials.com/search.php?page=1&c=Avatar - here there are a couple of Tutorials to making an Avatar (still and animated). I will tell you how to make some pretty neat boarders though. It is best to have the Image with an Alpha Channel before doing this (right click on the layer in the Layers Dialog window and click on Add Alpha Channel or click under the menu Layer > Transparency > Add Alpha Channel) that way you can make whatever background color with a layer behind it. Click (Shift + Q) to activate Quick Mask, use the rectangle (R) or Eclipse (E) select tool, and leave a red boarder of about 1/2 inch all around and hit the Delete key. Then click on filters > Distort > Waves and set it to Amplitude to 25 and Wavelength to 5 and click okay. Then Filters > Gaussian Blur (RLE) and set it to 11 both and click ok. Then hit Shift + Q and click on select > Invert (Ctrl + I) then hit the delete key. You should also experiment with the Filters (Mainly Distort and Blur) Try to use Waves and then Newsprint which is about six filters above waves, then try the Blur. Good Luck Note: use RLE for images with big areas of same colour (masks, renderings of vector based images, cartoons, etc), IIR for those hardly two neighbour pixels are the same (photographs, noisy renderings, etc)