TC here again. Thanks for all your helpful suggestions - I'm very impressed by your willingness to help a rank beginner. You suggested that I should send a sample of the drawings, so here are two. One is just a pen drawing (not a proper scan, just a photo to test the GIMP process). I would like to remove the caption and the yellow strip (top left) and merge this drawing with anothe similar one onto the same page and then add a new caption in my handwriting - all so that it looks seamless and was drawn on the same page of a sketch book. The other example is has some watercolour - again I would like to merge two or more of these coloured drawings so that they appear to come straight from a sketchbook.

I'm planning to use Blurb to publish the book - it seems to be a good service.

I'll try your various other suggestions later this weekend

Thanks again

TC

Evened out the image by using a low frequency even Script-fu and then blened in some texture to make it look like it came from a scrapbook. Not sure exactly what you want, but here is an interpretation of what I think you wanted. Forgot to add that I used bootchk's Healing Script-fu which uses Resynthesizer to remove the desired areas.

Thanks - that's exactly what I need to do. I'll have a shot at doing it myself now and let you know how I get on.

TC

You can also remove desired areas by selecting the area you want removed press and hold down the alt key - click the left mouse button on the selected area, and move the selection to an area the same size with no defects - copy and paste that area - anchor the selection - this creates a new layer with your copied area -move the piece over the desired area you want to cover.This works very well for even patterned areas many times.It keeps the area the same texture and color of the original as you are copying areas of the original to cover the defects.
You can also use this method to add sketches to another on one layer.You may have to make the canvas bigger though - Image/Canvas size - this gives you a bigger area to work with.

Sort of like stamping out a copy of the selection with the colors or patterns you want, and covering the effected area.

For your drawing, you can easily extract the drawing lines from the rest using the "Threshold" tool and obtain a pure white background. You can then erase the white (Color/Color to alpha) and get an image that is transparent except for the strokes. You then put it over any background you want. The waterpaint is a bit harder to handle, because some of the white should become transparent and some other should not, so you have to make a selection before applying the color-to-alpha. Another possibility is to make a very much feathered selection around the drawing and delete the rest, so that is blends very smoothly in any background you add.

Great suggestions and superb drawings!

Thanks everybody for all your suggestions. I have spent some time today trying to do what you have advised, but it's slow going because I am so GIMP illiterate - but I did finally get a fairly decent and clean image of Anthony using the Threshold tool (though it added a lot of black to the LHS which I then had to rub out). Anyway, I'll practice a bit more next week.

Lylejk I'm afraid your Script-fu routine is beyond my powers for the time being - I couldn't even get it to download onto my machine.

Thanks again to you all - I'm v impressed by Gimp Chat

TC

Just click the links and copy them in your Scripts directory under you user account. That location is dependent on what OS you use. Win Win7 it's under users/{your account name}/.gimp-2.6/scripts.