Creating a Carbon fiber wallpaper in Gimp

Motivation

I am getting a new payment card with the option of designing the background myself. I thought that a carbon fiber background would be nice, and found wallpaper online to use for the purpose. Unfortunately my bank rejected this as I was not copyright owner of the image. So I figured I had to make one myself, document it and put online. The added benefit from this approach is that the wallpaper I have made is completely free for all to use for all intents and purposes without any attribution and every right to remix, share and redistribute.

Instructions for Gimp 2.6

From the blog Create Carbon Fibre Pattern In Photoshop [hongkiat.com] I created a 2×4 pattern with the colors:

I scaled the pattern to 20×40 using the scale option with out any interpolation:

Next, I saved this image as a “Gimp pattern” with the .pat postfix and moved this file to /home/tjansson/.gimp-2.6/patterns/ and presed the update button in the patterns dialog in Gimp. With this pattern loaded I created a new image with the size of 1920×1280 and filled it using the pattern as seen in this screenshot:

Finally to make it just a tad less boring I created a new transparent layer put the opacity to 20% and made a gradient or blend using the Gimp blend tool and the blend “Rounded edge”, see this screenshot:

So here it is the result – 10 minutes of work minus the blogging:

So now by bank has no possibility of rejecting the wallpaper as I made my self. 🙂

References

Create Carbon Fibre Pattern In Photoshop[hongkiat.com]
How to DIY your own carbon fiber wallpaper?[ebin.wordpress.com]