Graffiti texture creation from image in gimp/krita

Question

I want to take a black and white image and create a graffiti image out of it, as in the cover of linkin park's album "hybrid theory", and i must do this with either gimp or krita. The result will be a texture, so i don't want funky backgrounds or anything outside the graffiti in the resulting image. How could i do?

Answer 1

Take your picture:

• Colors>Desaturate
• Colors>Brightness contrast and add a lot of contrast, adjust brightness to keep enough parts of the image dark:

• Layer>Mask>add layer mask, initialize with greyscale copy of layer and ticj the "invert mask" (you want the white to be transparent)
• Alpha-lock the layer and bucket fill with required color