During the last days, my SO told me a couple of times
that I was strange (why am I not surprised?) She has seen
me picking up some small flowers, dead bugs, stones and
other weird stuff from various places, then running back
home and putting them on my scanner. I told her that these
would make great textures and brushes for the GIMP, but she
is still thinking that I am a bit strange. She was
disgusted
when she saw me tearing off the wings of a dead dragonfly
in order to scan them (I got the idea from here).
But she liked the final result very much: dragonfly wings
are
beautiful and can be used as a GIMP brush to create very
nice effects. Now I still have to find a dead locust
somewhere…

Besides this and some more hacks and bug-fixes on the
GIMP code and Script-Fu’s, I also spent some time trying to
convert scans or photos into tileable textures. There are
many
ways to do that, depending on which features of the original
image should be preserved (the “make seamless” plug-in does
not give good results most of the time). Maybe I should
write a
tutorial about that, because the tricks that should be used
to
make real objects tileable are different from the ones that
are
used to create textures from scratch.