I’ve been absolutely amazed this evening by what can be achieved by a non-technical user with The GIMP as a cre­ative tool.

Kim Pounder is a remark­able artist when equipped with pen and paper, as those who know her may be aware. Those who aren’t, I’d advise visit her gallery some time. You’ll note a hand­ful of coloured works in there, amongst the sketches and black and white art: this is attrib­uted by her to a lack of soft­ware (for the pur­poses of colour­ing and shading).

Kim isn’t Linus Tor­valds. She’s mod­er­ately com­puter lit­er­ate, but not any more so than most. If noth­ing else, I thought it would be a great usabil­ity exper­i­ment to sug­gest she use The GIMP for edit­ing and colour­ing her art­work dig­i­tally, instead of rec­om­mend­ing the typ­i­cally accepted soft­ware, Pho­to­shop or Illus­tra­tor. Essen­tially, finan­cial rea­sons meant that nei­ther appli­ca­tion was a viable option for her, and I wasn’t about to advo­cate piracy.

At this point, I rec­om­mended The GIMP to her, and offered down­load links… which, for what­ever rea­son, weren’t work­ing for her. So I down­loaded The GIMP and GTK+ pack­ages for Win­dows, burnt them to CD (haha, no, I didn’t bother with includ­ing the pro­gram source code! Kim, you’re most wel­come to the source code if you desire it — there, GNU com­pli­ance!), and phys­i­cally gave it to her. A few days later, not only has the appli­ca­tion been installed and con­fig­ured (those of you who have installed The GIMP recently may recall a screen DPI cal­i­bra­tion util­ity which must be nego­ti­ated), she’d also man­aged to use the tool to colour, using an air­brush, the “Wood­land Fae” illus­tra­tion.

Take that, those who con­demn the usabil­ity of Open-Source appli­ca­tions! I’ll admit it’s not up to the same inter­face stan­dards as those of Adobe, but then this project doesn’t (to the best of my knowl­edge) have any full-time spon­sored employ­ees work­ing on it, either. Oh, yeah, and it’s free.

The GIMP is the GNU Image Manip­u­la­tion Pro­gram. It is a freely dis­trib­uted piece of soft­ware for such tasks as photo retouch­ing, image com­po­si­tion and image author­ing. It works on many oper­at­ing sys­tems, in many languages.

The GIMP for Win­dows may be down­loaded from http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/ free of charge. Unix bina­ries and source code archives are avail­able directly from the offi­cial web­site of The Gimp, http://www.gimp.org/.

Tags: accepted software, Adobe, creative tool, GNU, Illustrator, Kim Pounder, official website, operating systems, remarkable artist, screen DPI calibration utility, The GIMP, UNIX, Windows