I am the Kat that Walks By Itself

Due to mastodon.au currently being down, I was looking around on mastodon.art, which I'm not as active on. And I started looking at the admin announcements. And about three or four announcements back, they say a few things about the Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). They explain in a non-hysterical way that the name GIMP was not chosen innocently -- the creators of the program admit that it was due to the word "gimp" used in "Pulp Fiction" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP#cite_note-8). Therefore they would have known that the word was a slur, and they have been told repeatedly that it was a slur and have not changed the name.

IMHO, I'm all for giving people the benefit of the doubt (e.g. Coon Cheese was named after Mr. Coon who invented the specific process for that cheese, and therefore I am certain that they did not intend for it to be racist) but if somebody knew from the get-go that the name they were using was an insult, and went ahead with it anyway, that's a problem. Perhaps they considered it a kind of self-depreciating humour -- that they felt their program to be such a humble offering that it was a cripple, but many people have not taken it that way.

So... I'm going to be changing all references that I can when I'm talking about the Gnu Image Manipulation Program. In the future, I'll refer to it as GnuIMP. I'm not going to even attempt to change past posts, that's too difficult to track down and alter, but at least I'll be changing my wording from now on.

Yes, it's a small thing, but it is easily done, so why shouldn't I be courteous if it doesn't cost me much?

I had always wondered why they had chosen such an odd name for the program, but I had assumed that it was inadvertent.

In the spirit of keeping you folks more up to date, I hereby present a Nameless work which I finished today. I am Quite Pleased, even if I say so myself.

You probably will find it hard to believe, but THIS is the fluid art painting I started with:
( cut for image )

And THIS is the result which I finished today (after much much much fiddling and tweaking and throwing things out):
( cut for image )
Maybe I'll just call it something dull like "Celtic Star". I'd appreciate suggestions for a more interesting title!

A little about the process... I did not screencap myself working on this, I usually don't, because it would be hard to keep track, because I usually work on my digital art in bursts, not usually all at once, not unless I have a specific goal in mind, like "I'm going to do the Element Calcium"... and even then, I'm likely to put it aside for further tweaking. (I do have two digital-art-process videos in raw form, which I do intend to put up on my YouTube channel when I finally get around to editing them.)

When I'm doing an exploratory piece, I usually make several duplicate layers of the original, doing some standard effects on them: desaturation, white balance, colour inversion, value inversion... Whichever ones I don't like, I'll undo or delete. With this one, I kept the white-balance layer and the desaturated-and-white-balanced layer. I kept the desaturated layer on top, so as not to be distracted by the colours, but just looking at the light-and-dark. Then I figured that, since I'd been downloading a bunch of Celtic Knot clip art recently, I'd go with one of those as a base shape. Import the clip art, fill it white, set it to Difference. (Oh, the Difference filter is my most-used filter, I think, it is just So Interesting And Unpredictable.) Made various layers to give it a 3D effect. Thought I'd go for the same kind of effect I used in Trinity, which was done by making two layers of "ripples" out from the knot, filling them with Solid Noise, and setting them both to Difference. That gives a cool fade-in/fade-out effect.
Then I tried out lots of Difference layers underneath the "ripples" layers to change all the colours, it ended up being mostly green and pink and white.

Then I showed it to my friend JB, saying I was probably going to throw it away because it felt a bit "meh" to me, but she liked it, so that persuaded me to take another look at it. Fiddled with it a bit more, then thought "Why don't I turn it sideways?" So I transformed it with 90 degrees rotation... and then I realised that the drop-shadow looked odd, and, just as I was about to delete the drop shadow and do it again, I realised that the angle of the star looked odder. Because being a seven-pointed star, it looks unbalanced when it has just been rotated 90 degrees. So I decided to start again from scratch! With the same clip-art, but now oriented correctly for a Landscape image.
More layers for 3D effects. A slightly deeper drop-shadow. More "ripples" layers. This time I decided to put the colour filter Difference layer above the ripples layers, and I kept on changing my mind as to whether I would put the main Celtic-knot layer above or below the colour filter layer. I tried out So Many colour filter layers and was Not Happy with any of them. It was all too bright and garish. I was hankering for something more subtle, more like Celtic Inlay. Finally got something that made me think of icebergs, done with a pale blue gradient. Then I made the desaturated layer down below semi-transparent, so that a little colour from the original painting came through. This is an effect I like to do last; it adds just that little bit more variation in the colours, very subtle, without messing up the general composition.

And there you have it! Hope this was interesting for you.