Here goes the so promised update, so enjoy
1. decide how big the background will be, in my case, I want it to be 100 pixels high, and that the curvature in Dart's wings becomes the rightmost border
so obviously, what I will do is to inster a new layer which is 100 pixels high and 400 pixels wide (this is for the border to be covered by the wings
notice that it will appear in the top, and it won't move no mater what you do, well, the thing is that the GIMP does not allow you to move layers unless there is actually something in them.... so the trick is to paint it, move it and then clean it (remember, Ctrl+K)
2. of course that I will add another background, so I got some cool image in google and selected it, and as expected I pasted it and sent it to the bottom layer......
3. then I make the border, as this picture tends to be dark, then the most intelligent thing is to use a border that makes contrast with the sig, so I use the color picker to pick a color from dart's armor to use it as a border (and that way the border matches with the image
)
so, how do I make a border?.... I just insert a layer that is 1 pixel bigger than the background image and put it behind, another trick is to duplicate the background layer and then paint it with the border color, then I just select all and shrink the selection by 1 pixel..... I will use the first method
Transparency and File Formats
The trick is to create a new layer containing NGEmu's background color, so it looks like it is transparent
there is another way to create this transparence... which is to leave the transparent part as it is... and then save it either as a gif or a png....
GIF: default format for animations or transparent images, it is ugly and has quite a low quality, plus uses a 256 color pallette (too small, considering other formats using 24 bit coloring which allows you to use millions of colors)
PNG: a rather new format featuring an almost flawles transparency algorithm.... has a regular compression. the bad thing is that the most used browser does not show png images as they are meant to be... yes, I am talking about IE.... other browsers like mozilla an opera show the images well...