Make Circles, How to Do It with GIMP

Open GIMP

To make circles:

You must first select the Ellipse Select Tool and start sliding your mouse.
After you start sliding your mouse, press & hold your shift key to turn the ellipse into a perfect circle.

Before you go on, watch the video below. It will summarize this page and help you follow what you are reading.

Click on Select > Border.
Use the arrows to create the preferred width for the border.
Click Edit > Fill with FG color.
Click File > Export As and give it a descriptive name.
Go to File > Open and double-click on the name of the file you just created.
To fill the circle with a different colour, double-click the foreground colour box (in this image, it is blue), select the colour you want and click OK.
Then click on the paint can tool and click within the circle.
The inside of the circle will turn blue.

Isolate the circle

The circle is on top of a rectangle. This is how to make circles so that the outer edge is invisible.

Right click within the layers panel and click on New Layer > Transparency > OK.
Right click within the layers panel and click on Merge Down.
Click the Fuzzy Select Tool.
Click the Delete key.
You will get a circle such as the one you see in the image. There is no markings of a rectangle around it.

The video below may help your creative juices flow so that you can imagine how to use circles in an advertisement or some other promotional piece.

Some of the things I did to make this animation:

Made the circles with GIMP using a 50% opacity.
I coordinated the movement of the 3 circles by creating 3 different animated GIFs using Apple Keynote and ScreenFlow.
- The first animated GIF used only the blue circle.
- The second animated GIF used the blue circle animated GIF and the red circle.
- The third animated GIF used the second animated GIF and the yellow circle.

See if you can duplicate that video. Change the opacity to darker colours and see what happens.