Create a post-it effect in The Gimp

A common trend in web design lately is the idea of using everyday objects in designs such as pens, ink, paper, handwriting and post-its. In this tutorial I going to show you how to design a yellow post-it in The Gimp, I will be doing a number of tutorials teaching you how to do a number of things in the coming weeks including paperclip, paper and pen effects, so keep checking for these or subscribe to my RSS feed.

Continues below...

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Step 1

Create a new image in The Gimp, for this tutorial I am going to use a width of 300px and a height of 300px. Create a new layer and set the foreground colour to fff000 and the background colour to ecdf10 in the colour selector on the main Gimp window.

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Step 2

Now click and drag using the select tool to select a square on the image and fill it with the foreground colour, it should look something like this:

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Step 3

Go to the Layer menu and select AutoCrop Layer, then select the transform tool from the toolbox and click and drag each of the corners so that it looks like this:

Click the Transform button, and on the Layers menu select Layer to Image size.

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Step 4

Now press Ctrl and A to select the contents, Ctrl and X to cut the contents and then Ctrl and V to paste the contents back in, this will select the post-it area. With the blend tool selected, click and drag from the top of the selected region to the bottom a the angle of the right hand side, this will create something like this:

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Step 5

Now we are going to add the drop shadow, to do this go to Filters > Light and Shadow > Drop Shadow. On the window that appears change the settings to:

And press OK, this should give you something like this:

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Step 6

You may notice that some of the shadow is showing on the left and right hand side, you do not want this so to get rid of it, select the Drop Shadow layer and use the transform tool to click and drag the top left and top right of the layer inside like this:

Also at this point move the drop shadow layer around a bit to see where it is best positioned, I noticed that if I move it to the right a bit, it looks a lot better.

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Step 7

And finally, create a new layer on top and using the Paths tool draw an area like this on the post-it:

Press Enter and fill it with white (FFFFFF), change the opacity of the layer to 20.0 and you should get something like this:

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Result

And there you have it, a simple but effective post-it note:

You can download the XCF file here.