A couple of months ago, I joined the organizing committee for the Moisture Festival, a series of comedie/varieté shows held each spring in Seattle, Washington. When I joined, the committee was working madly to get everything together for a few holiday benefit/fundraising shows. Everybody was diving in and taking on duties left and right. As with most theater groups, we were short on time and funds, but we made up for it with creativity and dedication.

One of the duties I volunteered for was creating the signage we'd need for two weekends' worth of shows. I left the meeting with a list of a dozen signs to create--Restrooms, Reserved Seating, Box Office, Ticket Prices, Green Room and so on--and a CD-ROM containing photos from the previous year's shows that could be used on this year's signs.

When I signed up for the task, it seemed easy enough. On the car ride home, however, I realized I had never done anything like this before. I've never considered myself to be any sort of visual artist, and I wasn't sure where to start. Soon, though, I remembered The GIMP, or the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Linux Journal authors and readers have been singing its praises for years as an easy-to-use and flexible program for creating and editing all sorts of images.

So, here's my story of learning how to use The GIMP to create signs that--if I say so myself--turned out pretty great. Although I talk specifically about creating signs, the general steps can be used as a starting point for creating and editing any sort of image or photo you want. Once you figure out a few basic guidelines, you can do all sorts of things with The GIMP.

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