Creating an actual circle in Gimp (not an ellipse)Īs soon as you start drawing with the Gimp ellipse tool you’ll see that it really wants to create an ellipse, and not a circle. Using these steps, you should have created a hollow circle in Gimp that looks like the hollow circle on the left of this image:Īs noted in the Comments section below, if on Step 4 of these instructions you jump right to the “Fill with FG Color,” you’ll end up with a completely filled circle, as shown in the right of this image. Finally, click the Edit menu, and select the “Fill with FG Color” option.Īssuming that all worked, congratulations, that’s how you create a circle with Gimp.Make sure the foreground color is set to the color you want.When you click OK on that dialog, you should now see that your ellipse/circle appears to have a border, with dashed lines making up the inner and outer border edges.You can also experiment with the “Feather Border” setting to see if you like what it does. (I know that’s not what it says, but that’s what it means.) I generally use two or three pixels. On the Border Selection dialog that comes up, select the pixel width for your circle.On the Gimp menu, click the Select menu, then the Border menu item.

(Hold down the Shift and Alt keys while drawing to make a circle rather than an ellipse.) (Click one spot, drag the mouse to a second spot, and then release it.) I recommend making it just a little bit larger than you think you’ll need it, because the circle border will have a slight width to it.

Draw an ellipse/circle where you want it on your image.

Select the Ellipse tool from the Gimp Toolbox.

Here are the steps to creating a circle in Gimp, specifically a hollow circle:

Update: I included a video at the end of this tutorial that demonstrates everything I describe in the text that follows. For purposes like that I create hollow circles to highlight something in the original image, so I’ll demonstrate that here, and I’ll also show how to create solid circles in Gimp, which are even easier to create. I just used Gimp to create several circle images in my iPhone Safari browser privacy and security tutorial, and this is a short tutorial on how I created them. Gimp FAQ: How do I draw a circle in Gimp?

Gimp drawing an ellipse