Help with a logo

[thebahamen]

So I volunteered to design the logo for my college's astronomy and physics club because no one else would man-up to the position, ha.

Only problem is, I don't know my left from my right when it comes to this stuff.

My plan is to turn the school logo (attached) into a constellation on a background (sample attached). A how-to guide would be great, but any tips at all would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[ofnuts]

Got anything bigger than the thumbnail?

[ofnuts]

That won't give you a good logo... but an interesting background for the club's web pages...

Getting out of the Gimp side of things.... constellations are figments of our imagination. We "see shapes". No constellation looks that much like the real thing, so don't expect to reproduce the logo exactly. So, my shot at it:

• Scale up the logo to the right size. The result is crap but it doesn't matter
• Silhouette the shape obtained using the Path editor, using the scaled logo as a guide. Simplify (especially around the mouth) . Add two circles around the eyes. If you flip the image, you have two interesting bright stars that can be where the eyes are, so try to move/scale the logo so that it fits.
• hide the logo/move it to bottom (no longer needed)
• add a black layer below the stars field
• on the Stars field: "Layer/Mask/add layer mask". Initialize to white. You are now editing the layer mask, anything you do on it really applies to the transparency of the layer: where you paint black it becomes completely transparent, where you paint white it is opaque, and you can paint gray for partial opacity.
• In the Path list, right-click on the path created above, and "Path to selection". This should select the tiger head
• "Select/invert"
• Bucket fill with gray. This makes the layer outside of the head partially transparent, so the black layer your added shows through a bit: stars are dimmer.
• To smooth the edge: "Filter/Blur/Gaussian" (around 50px)
• To finish: with a white brush paint over the stars in the eyes to bring them back to the original level
• Also: select a tiny area around a bright star (20x20). Feather by about its radius (10) and edit/copy.
• In the brush list, the first brush is is the "clipboard" and so should be you star.
• Remove selection ("Select/None")
• Start the paintbrush and click at strategic points to add stars: fangs, ear, maybe be a couple more to mark the shape
  

Here is a quickie, you can do better with more time/care (the Path is upside down because I figured out after the silhouette step that I could use the two stars for the eyes)
   

Full XCF attached:

[thebahamen]

Awesome advice, thank you, man.