Hikergotchi tutorial :-P

If you’ve been looking at the posts on my friend Prasanna’s blog, you would’ve come across his recent hackergotchi tutorial.

Now, I’m going to demonstrate something similar - how to make your hikergotchi.

Hiker is a word that I associate not with the typical trekker, but with someone who is frequently asked to take a hike! So, you’d want to make yourself look as dumb as possible. (I would’ve wanted to use a better word instead of hiker, but I’d prefer my blog to be free from swear words).

Now here’s someone who was dumb enough to pose for a hikergotchi. So let’s make one for him:

Step 1: Select your face using the Rectangular select tool in The GIMP. Then crop to selection.

Step 2: Use the intelligent scissors to select only the face of your unintelligible self.

Step 3: Finish selecting only the face, invert selection, add alpha channel to layer, and hit delete. Effectively, this will remove the background and leave transparency behind.

Step 4: Drop shadow!

And this is what you should’ve got now:

Step 5: Ahh… so we are done. But wait, it doesn’t look all that ugly as yet, does it? Let us add some background! Select the ugliest combination of colours you can think of (I chose pink and yellow) and draw the most random gradient you can think of, on a new background layer. We’re done! You’ve just shown the world that you’re a complete moron!!! Now, you can put this on various profiles that you may have all over the internet world and popularize yourself!

I must profusely thank my friend here who supported me in producing this tutorial by posing for a hikergotchi. Thanks a lot!