Bafdaap, Angh, Kviller, and Neofusion's graphics are done! This request was pretty straightforward, but I believe it's the longest, most tedious request I've ever done, LOL. It wasn't because of the information or wish list I was given, but the sheer volume of work involved. All told, 10 graphics were made using 8 different screenshots (all of which had to have their backgrounds erased), and it took me about 3 days from start to finish. I'm fairly pleased with the way they came out, and the requester seems to be happy with them too, which is what really matters. The original request was for an animated sig and avatar: (The sig is 500x100, 16 frames, 265.9 KB. The avatar is 80x80, 16 frames, 59.5 KB. I probably could have cut the file size down a little more, but the resulting image quality would have been atrocious.) Knowing how much I hate the loss of detail when I put several different graphics into an animated GIF, I also made high-quality JPEGs for each character:
[p]Thx a ton Seagoat They are great! Like the colors [/p][p] [/p][p]And for those afraid that i might loose the uber Potatoe siggie, no - i wont replace it Seagoat's siggie will only be used on other boards than the Everquest 2 board [/p][p] [/p][p]Edit: Btw, Seagoat - i think maybe another donation is headed your way [/p]
[p]I noticed something awesome today...[/p][p]Scarrlette's using the sig and avatar I made her! Woowoo![/p][p]/flex[/p]
[face="helvetica"]They're all very pretty! So I should take screenies of Kaeta... >.> I need to get Khell ones of Laena. Eeps! They're just still babies though![/face]
[p]Congrats Seagoat! I really think you deserve to get your custom avatar because your art is used by an admin [/p]
[p]Thanks, Fade! No rush on the screenies...whenever you have time and feel like it. [/p][p]Thanks, Ronja! Ooooh, a custom avatar...? That would be niiice... Wonder which one I'd use?? Maybe I'd have to make a whole new one![/p]
[p]Balam, Ricardo, and Yddraig's sigs are done![/p][hr][p]First up is Balam; I did a sig for this character ages ago, and he was pretty pleased with it:[/p][p][/p][p]I used a leopard print pattern overlay to complement his fur pattern. In the background you can see the Balam, a Mayan jaguar warrior spirit, and behind the text at the bottom, the macana, an Aztec weapon. The colors I used were picked from his hat and jewelry (his eyes were tweaked a little and his armor desaturated to silver).[/p][hr][p]Next is Ricardo:[/p][p][/p][p]He's a ladies' Ratonga! His attitude comes from the 80s Gerardo song "Rico Suave," which I pulled a quote from to use as his custom text.[/p][p]This background has a fur texture, and I used the designs on his face as inspiration and found a tribal heart design that I blurred and put in the background. I rotated his armor from red to green (since Yddraig's sig is red) and desaturated it a bit; I picked a green from there and an orange from his nose to use as the main colors.[/p][hr][p]Last is Yddraig:[/p][p][/p][p]He's named after the the Welsh flag (Y Ddraig Goch, which translates to "the Red Dragon" ), and you can see the dragon from the flag in the background. The text behind the text at the bottom (heh) is "Cymru am byth:" "Wales Forever," the Welsh national motto.[/p][p]I used reptile scales for his background pattern, and the colors I used were picked straight from Yddraig's scales (yes, there really is green in there!). I desaturated his armor a bit so the blue didn't compete with the red and green.[/p][hr][p]The resulting animation is, again, the best that can be expected from the GIF format:[/p][p][/p][p]A lot of detail was lost, and a lot of the subtle gradients were dithered into oblivion. The characters still look pretty good, though, and the text is readable, so I guess I can't ask for more, hehe.[/p][p] [/p]
I love that you explain what you do to the sigs. I learn so much just by reading your posts. Thanks for that!
[p][size="x-large"]Great work AS ALWAYS![/size][/p][p] [/p][p][size="x-large"]They came out perfect and each one captures the "meaning behind the character" well, which is important to me as my characters always usually have a story behind their creation.[/size][/p][p] [/p][p][size="x-large"]Thanks for the excellent job,[/size][/p][p][size="x-large"]Balam, Ricardo and Yddraig[/size][/p]
[p]I made these earlier in response to a sig SOS from Echgar. [/p][p]A repost of the shop talk: I took these screenshots myself in Antonica. I applied a plugin to give them a colored-pencil look, then used different blend modes over a light blue background to give each a different feel from the others. Each image's text and frame use yet another blend mode, according to what I felt looked best on each background.[/p][p] [/p][p] [/p][p] [/p]
[p]I'm once again open for requests![/p][p]Please read my OP carefully and follow the instructions therein. If you have questions, you can post here or contact me through my website.[/p][p]EDIT: PS - I've just totally reworked my request form. It no longer requires JavaScript -- it's now entirely PHP-based, coded by Yours Truly. It took me about three days to do, working off and on (and referencing the PHP online documentation a LOT), but I learned loads in the process! If you have any errors with it, please let me know.[/p][p]Next website projects:[/p][ul][li]Recoding the contact form to be all-PHP instead of Perl/CGI.[/li][li]Taking a cue from Sapphire's website and adding pages of graphics in chronological order. (I think it would be cool to see how I've "grown" as a sig artist since I started taking requests.)[/li][/ul]
Thank you! *blush* It's like everything else; I have fun, and I learn cool stuff, so I keep doing it, hehe. The day the fun / learning stops is the day I move on to something else. It should be pretty easy for me to get a chronological listing done, since I saved a copy of my old thread, and I posted everything there. There's no way I'm hard-coding all those images...more fun with arrays!!
I whipped up a quick animation for a side request: It's ginormous, but I tried every trick in the book to get the size down, without much luck. It only uses 32 colors (black, white, and shades of grey), but the frame count is what's keeping it huge. I really like the subtle animation, though, and I learned through trial and error that if I took out too many frames or increased the frame duration much, the animation became too choppy. (243.4 KB, 60 frames, 6.6 second duration)
[p]Hollyfia and Seryndipity's sigs are done![/p][p]For Hollyfia, she wanted purple and black, but I honestly couldn't resist the shade of magenta that her sleeves were! I used dings from a font I have with a heart design in the background, and I did a lot of touching-up to the screenshot to smooth it out and intensify the colors. [/p][p][/p][p]For Seryndipity, she wanted green and yellow with leaves of some sort. I used a different ding (from a different font, heh) that has a central flower and leaves in threes at the four corners. I didn't do quite as much tinkering with this screenshot, but I did touch it up a little and intensify the colors.[/p][p][/p][p]The animation, once again, is the best that can be expected. Even with two frames (and therefore slightly fewer colors involved), the loss of detail is noticeable and, unfortunately, unavoidable. (240.1 KB, 7 second duration)[/p][p][/p][p]Hope you like them, NinRayne! [/p]
