October 2007

Deathtoll and Thanksgiving

stargrace October 7, 2007 3Comments

Firstly, happy turkey day to all those up here in Canada, I’ll be celebrating it with family, both today and tomorrow. That’s a whole lot of turkey. No such thing as too much though I suppose. Last night I managed to sneak into a Deathtoll (ok, so I didn’t really sneak, but doesn’t that sound better?) raid with Arsenal, new guild that I joined. I have a few friends in it, so it makes the guild better from the start. The raid was a little messy, but it was also late, and the typical tank wasn’t there, and a healer was missing. But before long we downed Tarinax and what not, so that’s always good, right?

Of course breath of the destroyer dropped, which is an item I’ve wanted forever and just never managed to get yet. Last night was no exception, not that I was utterly heartbroken or anything since it was my first raid with them. I spent a good portion of last night taking screen shots of “spooky” places so I could work on some headers and more graphic stuff with photoshop. It just takes me time to decide what it is that I specifically want to do. I played around with a few more signatures yesterday before I left for the evening.

So happy turkey day, and enjoy that stuffing. I’ll be back to make a larger post tomorrow.

Signature Goodness

stargrace October 6, 2007 4Comments

I’ve always been envious of those people over in the EQ2 players forums who had these absolutely amazing forum signatures. I’m a fairly artistic person, besides writing I have a DeviantArt site here, the problem is I know little to nothing about photoshop or any other drawing / graphic program out there. I’ve always worked in very traditional mediums, pen and ink mostly. So I’ve got the artistic flare, but never had any means of carrying out my designs. Especially when it came to photo manipulations or anything else of the sort.

So above is the first signature I designed! I must admit, I had help. First of all from my brand new photoshop CS2 bible (which is by far one of the most comprehensive guides I’ve ever read) and also from the signature forum here, specifically their posts on resources and tutorials.

I admit, the signature may not look like much, but come on now it was my first shot! Very first. I didn’t know how to do anything, and that includes making the lighter blue boarder and having the image over lap that, which I am proud of I’ve got to admit.

Hopefully there will be more work in the future, and if anyone would like me to experiment with signatures (or desktops) of their characters, please feel free to email me high quality screen shots and I’ll see what I can do (email is posted on the top left of this site)! I’m so excited, eventually I want to be able to do pieces like Luna here. I know she does it professionally, and the quality of her work has taken years and years, but in time, maybe I can accomplish something of the same degree, and if not, well, at least I’m having a blast trying!

Oh, as a side note. This attempt was not at trying to smooth out edges, or adjust the image of the fae, but to learn a few technical things that I had no idea how to do. Specifically the boarder and making it faded slightly, applying the fae image over top, and the text, and working with layers and adjusting them and what not. So I know the image is not the best quality, and her wings are cut off (next I plan on learning how to move that image that I apply to a background.. I still don’t know how to do that) and there’s all sorts of other flaws that I can see, but hey, it’ll get better with time!