I love the abstract stuff gallery! How do you go about creating one of these? I can't even imagine.

Thanks! In a way it's a mix of generative and manual art, I guess. It starts with gradients or noise. Afterwards it's layers upon layers of color mapping, filters, distortion, more noise, more gradients, etc. - Basically creating artifacts from lossy transforms/mappings/distorts/layer modes and then building those up again into an image. Rinse and repeat.

Some examples of things I made use of:

Colors > Levels. Mostly to get noise to go across the whole range from black to white, not just some in-between. Multiple iterations of reducing the output levels and then stretching those out to the full range again can create interesting artifacts.

Colors > Curves. Same as above, and also final processing. I used a fixed set of gradients (UIGradients) and usually changed them up.

Colors > Map > Gradient Map. Combining the above with gradient mapping, or combining it with noise can result in interesting artifacts as well.

Colors > Desaturate > Color To Gray. Adds grain, texture and contrast around edges. Lots you can do with that, especially by distorting the result.

Filters > Distorts > Kaleidoscope, Filters > Map > Panorama Projection, Filter > Map > Paper Tile. With the exception of the galaxy one, all the ones in the album are somehow the result of those.

I did most of these in 2019 when I was deeply burned out, and clicking around for hours was all I was able to do. It really was kind of therapeutic.

So yeah, I am really glad GIMP exists.

Thank you very much for the pointers! I just tried a bunch randomly, and got this result in under 5 minutes: https://imgur.com/a/4Tb4uWC

Fantastic stuff. I appreciate you typing it all out.

Very cool! And no problem at all, glad I could get you to experiment.