So, you've mastered the "small scripts" using GD, and area ready for a little more meat in your diet? Well, this new PHPBuilder.com article just might be the info you need.

Advanced Image Editing Under the GD Library steps you through a few neeat little tricks that a bit more advanced GD users wil find helpful - things like colorizing your images, outlining some text inside the image, making your text translucent, and even adding textures to the text. While most of these are still pretty simple (see the code examples), they might be pretty difficult to figure out, given the odd nature of creating images with GD. It's not the most intuitive library to use, but it does its job well.

You'll need GD to use this tutorial (obviously), but these days, GD comes bundled with the PHP install - just throw a "--with-gd" into the configure line and you're all set...