Thanks Erisian, PC. I hope to have the tute done soon. I've been really busy working on building a new patio. Almost done though so I'll have more time for GIMP!

Draconian. I luckily kept the xcf in layers. Maybe this will help you get the knotted look. Its a png with transparency.

Thanks for the template Erisian. I'm really digging the new brush dynamics option in 2.8 (I know 2.7x had it too). This use to be a 20 rotational gih brush, but now it's a single layer brush. Created a selection and stroked it. I also using RobA's Mosaic Helper Script-fu to create the concentric background. Not sure how many angles you can get with the new dynamics, but still it's good enough for me. My only other beef is there's a bug in exporting jpeg preview; you don't get an accurate size constraint when you change paramters (always shows 1.3G which is obviously wrong). I'm sure it will get corrected on the next rendition. Going to try to install the Riot optimizer soon and use it to save png and jpegs anyway (and it's save to file size feature is the bomb).

Nice work Lyle. When 2.8 comes out as portable, I'll download it. I'm still concerned about conflicts with 2.6.11 which I want to keep for Gimp Painter.

2.8 does indeed uninstall 2.6 Erisian and there's no way to stop this. However, your .gimp2.6 directory stays intact and all you have to do is re-install GIMP 2.6 and all will be as it was before (at least it was for me) for GIMP 2.6. Using MareroQ's batch file will even allow you to run both versions of GIMP at the same time which is cool (can I say copy paste; lol) or use Shellout to share info between the two GIMPs. One cool thing about GIMP 2.8 is the backwards compatibility. Huge issues with this during the birth of 2.0 to 2.2 to 2.4 and then to 2.6. Glad they found a way to allow 32-bit plugins to work with GIMP 2.8 64-bit and thanks to Graechan, I even have Mathmap and you and me both know that was the sole reason that I wasn't going to install 2.8 but install I did. Still wish the GIMP developers would have allowed 2.6 to remain installed and not sure why they did what they did since they both appear to not interfere with each other (as long as you install them in separate directories which I did).

Thank you. I'll give that a shot.

Erisian- Looks to me like you are already on the right track.

Thanks Drac!