First Shot at a Character Banner

[Admiral_Stalfos19]

This is a banner that I've made for a nephilim character that I've made for Golden Gate Empire. Her name is Kai Alvarado, and she is participating in a fighting tournament with multiple arenas. I'd explain more, but I digressed enough.

 

Yui was kind enough to give me a crash course on banner making this morning, and this is the result:

 

 

...

 

As you can see, it's very crash indeed; about the fanciest thing on there is the image of the sunset that I found randomly on the internet, which I've set in the background. Looking at it now, it's actually not that bad for a first attempt. Although...

 

• You may see a few random white lines throughout the sunset image that I've used, which I'll admit kind of ruin the background as a whole. Those are probably due to a watermark that happened to be on the image itself, but at this stage, I'm not confident enough to dick around trying to clean those lines up.
• If I knew how to outline the text, I'd have done it already. That might help stop the green clashing with the yellow any more than it has, but I tried my best with the knowledge I had on hand :/
• There are a couple additions I'd have liked to make, but I've enough sense to keep it simple for now.

But yeah, rate away and let me know if you like it. I may do more in the future should I get the hang of GIMP as a whole.

[Yui]

If I knew how to outline the text, I'd have done it already. That might help stop the green clashing with the yellow any more than it has, but I tried my best with the knowledge I had on hand :/

You could've asked me how to do that while I was running down the tl/dr on how I make my banners man =w=; I'll just leave the knowledge here for your future reference. Should probably note that this assumes you're using GIMP, since that's what I use.

1. Select your text layer w/ the text tool. While you're editing the text, right-click it and select "Path from Text".
2. Create a new transparent layer and move it under your text layer.
3. Use the "select from path" option (key shortcut is shift-V), then go to the "Select" menu and choose "Grow"
4. Grow your selection by whatever number is necessary. For my banners, I grow by 2.
5. Fill selection with black.

If you still have the xcf file or whatever equivalent, you can probably just edit from there. Otherwise, you can probably get a similar effect by using the select by color tool and just hitting all the green text, or even just re-create the text layer directly onto your current banner.