Gimp brushes, as you perhaps well know, are bitmap based and quite limited. You can make dynamically resizable brushes in the brush editor, but they are still limited as to shape.
But what if there were a way to make "brushes" that could be resized, rotated, and otherwise manipulated however you wanted?
Enter Inkscape.
I am a moderator on Gimptalk.com. I have seen a lot of requests lately for vector brushes. Well...vector simply means a more or less simple shape made with paths.
And what is (imho) the best way to do paths? Inkscape! Lots more options and control than Gimp.
So, what you do is you design your brushes in Inkscape.
Once you have the path done in Inkscape, you save it out and import it into Gimp. Make sure that before you do, you put the path in the upper left corner of the Inkscape canvas. When Gimp imports them, that is where they will show up. Put them anywhere else and you may have a hard time finding them, since Gimp can actually import them outside the canvas area.
Once you have the path there, you can use the transform tools to move, scale, rotate, shear, flip, and even use the perspective tool on them. Yes that's right on the PATH by itself, not by turning the path into a selection and filling it with something, then manipulating the resulting image.
So what good is that?
Well, instead of a brushes dialog, just have a Gimp .xcf file open with nothing but paths in it. Just like the layers dialog, you can drag and drop paths in between images and it copies the path into the image. From there, you scale/manipulate it accordingly. This is perhaps more cumbersome than using brushes, but then it is also more flexible as well, since with a conventional Gimp brush, you are limited by however the brush designer designed the brush. With this method, you can make your "brush" fit the canvas and image you are working on.
Now lets take it a step further....what if you want an "oddball" brush, that isn't a vector? I haven't tried this...but it should work. Make a bitmap in Gimp, better if it is high contrast, import it into Inkscape and run Path>Trace Bitmap on it. You may have to clean up some extra control nodes, but once you have a path, you can again, scale it up or down, whatever. Import your creation into Gimp and you are good to go.
Even then...if you want to turn one of these path images into a regular brush, it is pretty easy to do so, just make a grayscale image of it on a white layer, select it and do Script-Fu>Selection>Selection to Brush.
Distribution of these "brushes" would simply be a matter of uploading a zipped .xcf file somewhere. You download the file, extract it, open it, then just drag the path you want to use into the image you are working on.
Anyway...I thought I would just throw this out there.
Here is a resource to illustrate what I am talking about, an .xcf file with four vector paths created using Inkscape and imported into Gimp. You can open this, drag them into whatever image you are working on and then use the transform tools to size and locate them where you want. When you are ready, turn them into selections and bucket fill. or you can make them into regular brushes.
http://www.box.net/shared/24mryjd5dv
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