Another crappy set.

[celticheavens]

Argh. I am really losing my graphics designing skills. Yesterday I was sieving through IGG, and decided to make a set for myself. Not that I can't use any of my other sets, but more of their file sizes are too big thanks to my animations. -_-||| My animating skills are still ok, but not my designing skills. ARGH!!!

So I was looking through all my picture, wondering if I should stick with anime, or something else. Since the Wow images were too difficult to work with at 11.55pm, I decided to use one of the pictures I took in UK. Found a suitable one, and started working on it. Problem was that the background, or rather the photo consisted of so much green... And there was no space for me to place the text. So I had to place it at the bottom, half of it outside of the siggy. Even the subtext had to go there, if not it would look really out of place.

Took me ages to align the text at a suitable position, and being the animating freak I am, I decided to do some animations. Simple ones, to keep it within the file size. Since a fader would overshoot the limit, I did a fillup, gradient style. It was easy and all so I imported the frames to IR and finished it. I happily placed it in my signature, and didn't notice a huge error.

Turns out that IR kills the images, or rather kills the transparent areas when you animate it. To get rid of the new white splotchy patches, you need to manually erase them from EVERY FRAME. ARGH! Smart me had decided to do quite a fair bit of transparent areas for an animated siggy, and I spent close to an hour re-erasing them and double checking... Took me 3 tries to get rid of them all. ARGH. It was like 2.10am when I was done. Yes, it was that tedious.

Even now, I am still not happy with the set. It isn't my style at all, besides the animation, and the image itself was hard enough to work with for me. As in I am so used to drawing and making my own backgrounds, so I can manipulate it to fit the text, now it is the other way around. AHHHH!!! Melesa, start designing soon, or you are going to have to start from scratch again. T_T

Here is my pathetic attempt. I am so going to redo it.


This was how it looked before it was cleaned up.


Ewwww. Now I am reconsidering if I should even do a new layout for my graphics website. My skills are going down the drain, instead of improving. Ah, this sucks, big time.

And I have Math Paper 2 tomorrow. Hurray.




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