Holly jolly

Now that we’re deep into December, it’s time for my annual Christmas-themed blog banner!

Heh, I really have very little artistic creativity or talent, but I do enjoy messing around with paintshop from time to time.

Basically all I do to create a banner is:

1. Find a cool wallpaper (usually some snazzy CG artwork), something that will look good with the blog style. This can be kinda hard, because although there’s a lot of amazing work out there, going through it all takes time. Plus you gotta find sites that are worthwhile starting points, because otherwise you’ll be slogging through endless pages of crap. And ya, I realize that I’m totally ripping off the person who made the wallpaper, but I consider it more of a homage than a theft. Although since I don’t bother attributing credit, it’s not like it does them any good…
2. Crop out a banner-sized rectangle, trying to pick a section that will look good with the rest of the page. For example, my Christmas banner has two trees, and my blog has two columns. The sidebar column is spanned by the left tree, and the right tree frames the outside edge of the main column. My banner also touches the top of the page, with no border or spacing above it, so by leaving out the tops of the trees the image makes sense. I’m definitely not a graphic artist or anything, but I think this works, non?
3. Add in the text layer, generally a title and some sort of tagline. Picking a tagline can actually require some thought too. Quotes or clever phrases are my favs. So I mess around with the text until I think it looks good, because different fonts/colours can have a major impact on the overall style of the banner. Also the placement of the text in the frame is pretty important – I’m a fan of leaving the title in the corner, usually a bottom corner. But you gotta make sure the text isn’t obscured by what’s in the image behind it, and likewise you shouldn’t really put text overlapping with something that stands out in the picture, but have it somewhere in a more boring region.
4. Toss in a few cheesy after-effects. After all, if you’re going to be using a cool photo editor, you might as well play around with the options. I’m sure if I bothered to upgrade to the latest version of paintshop or even tried photoshop that I’d find even more random stuff to try.

So ya, that’s pretty much it. If I was actually cool, I’d be able to actually make my own starting image. But alas, the entirety of the hereditary artistic ability in my family went to my brother, leaving me with a genetic deficiency in that area. I’m still holding out that, by the laws of the universe, this was balanced out by me receiving the entirety of some other genealogical gift… although my latest attempts at telekinesis still, as always, prove futile.

the only reason I have left is you