Starting from the bottom

Because we all have to start somewhere, right?

Anyway, you’ve probably noticed that part of the new banner is up and running. Rumor has it that this has greatly improved the load time on the site. My apologies to anyone that was having difficulties before. Except Tel. No apologies for you!

Playing around with different brush packs has been a lot of fun and I’ve come up with ideas for banners/signature panes that I don’t think would have occurred to me otherwise.

For instance, I was playing around with various “grunge” and “distressed” brushes, no real goal in mind.

Suddenly, the landscape of chipped sandstone started to pop off the page at me.

A splash of blood later and it was off to the WoW Model Viewer to start throwing together some poses for my baby warrior.

I’ve decided that he’s going to level as prot so it was natural to show him with a shield and I liked the way this armor set went with his hair, especially since it came with a crown-type helm. Must not obscure the foxtail!

There were some technical difficulties with the shield and getting it out of the Model Viewer. There is an option to export the screenshot as a PNG, which provides transparency around the character model.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason (perhaps it has something to do with the color number that transparency is assigned), the creamy colors of the shield were captured as transparent. So I had a warrior with little bits of floating teal and a glowy spot where the shield should have been.

Easy enough fix to replicate the pose and shoot it as a JPG, copy just the shield and drop it in place.

So here I present Cruorem’s banner: