Hi, there. Here is a wall paper I made using a screen saver animation.



If you'd like to make your own, follow these steps, below. I use gimp for this tutorial, so I suggest you do, too. Although Photoshop may have the features I use in gimp. If you don't have gimp get it here.
(You must have Windows 7!)

1. Right click on your desktop. Hit "Personalise". The menu you'd use to change the window colour. You should see this menu;



2. Press the screen saver button, which should bring up this menu;

Select "Ribbons". Then hit Apply and Ok.

3. Now you can wait for your screen to sleep or you can press the Preview button, both of these ways bring up the animation.

4. Here comes a tricky part. When you see a particular pattern you like, hit Ctrl + Alt + PrtSrc. Get your fingers ready, because when you press these buttons, the screen will wake again. You could use some screen recording wizardry too, if your computer is too quick.

5. Open up Gimp and press ctrl + v. This pastes the screen saver into Gimp. You can save this and use it now, if you like. Alternatively, you can continue and edit the image.

Cubism filter

Spoiler

Right click > filters > artistic > cubism. Adjust the dials to your liking.

Colourise filter. (Makes the image a shade of what ever colour you choose.)

Spoiler

Right click > colours > colorise. Drag the saturation slider to 100, and hue slider any where you like.

Supernova. These things are awesome.

Spoiler

Create a new transparent layer, this way you can move the supernova easier.
Right click > Layers > New layer. Check the transparent box. Now do this;
Right click > Filters > Light and Shadow > Supernova. Adjust the settings to your liking. You can now move around the Supernova. If you do move it, you'll see a colour difference between the two layers, so merge them together (Right click on the right window pane the supernova layer, and press "merge down".) Use the fill bucket to correct any colour issues.

Adding beveled text. This is easily done, and looks good.

Spoiler

Using the text tool, place your text and colour where you like. Next, duplicate the layer. Now go to the colour settings and hit Brightness-Contrast. Adjust the brightness slider, make it the text brighter.
Now use the rectangular select tool, and create a box which is half the width of the text. Now drag the box so that it's covering the bottom half of the text. Press ctrl + x. Hey, presto! A bevel! You can also use a circular select tool, giving you a nice, round bevel, too.

Nicely done, if you managed all that reading and copying. You can also scale the image down to create a forum signature or avatar.
If you want to create a rainbow effect, just create a new layer each time by duplicating the last and use the Hue-Saturation slider to change it. This will lower the quality of the image, though.
If I didn't explain something properly, tell me, and I'll redo the step with you. Post your results, too!  

Not interested?  

It's a cool way to get a wallpaper, I guess. But I do have to be honest and say the final product looks a bit tacky. I think I'd just take the original image and make that my background  

Fair enough. I like different colours and abstract patterns. Thanks for your opinion!