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Making avatars

What are avatars? Well, they're small images that people use as icons for themselves on social communites, like forums. I will explain what I use to make my avatars.

First, we need to find a small image that could be placed on a blank 100x100 file. Do you have your image? You may want to complete this list when you go through this guide.

First off, we'll start with this Pikachu. That's quite a big image, isn't it? It's dimensions are 241 x 246, but I don't think we need it that big. Maybe we should scale it down a bit, using the GIMP scaling tool. I'm going to scale it down to about 175x175 pixels. That looks very appropriate for size, doesn't it? Now, we're going to create a background. Let's say that our avatar is 150x150 pixels; which is actually plenty of room. Now, what should we create? A gradient, maybe just a yellow background, what? Today, I'm going to add a gradient, and repeated lines. The result is this. Yes, it's a little bit bad, but hey, this is just demonstrating how to make one. Now, let's add Pikachu into the image. After this, you add a border. This is what I do:

Make your foreground color black, and your background color white. Duplicate your avatar, by going to Layer -> Duplicate Layer. Go to Layer -> Transparency -> Alpha to Selection. Go to Edit -> Stroke Selection. The "Stroke Line" option should be selected. Choose 14 as your line width. Hit Stroke. Then, change your foreground color to white, and then stroke the selection again, but with a smaller line width. Make it about 7. Then, change your foreground color to black, and then make the line width 3 or 4 this time. The final thing to do is press CTRL + L, and then under the Layers option choose "Overlay". Merge your layers together, and you should get something that looks a little bit like this.

Finally, we add the text. I don't know what I can tell you about this, because it's your choice of what font you use and such.

This is what I created. I hope this helped!