Updated: Monday, April 14, 2003
Well, we now have our first one piece logo and I think I'll keep it. This was done with Paintshop Pro. First, the lettering was done in green with a black background on a much larger initial image than required. I then used the "blur more" filter three times in a row on the lettering. Yellow lettering was then placed directly on top of the blurred green image. (I magnified the image for placement.) Paintshop Pro allows you to rotate the lettering 90 degrees as in "The."
The tree image was done in black magic marker on a sheet of 8 1/2" X 11" paper and scanned. Like the lettering, it was exported as a gif file. No clean-up was done on it. The green foreground and yellow background colors were set with Paintshop Pro in preparation for the next step.
I drew a separate circle (using the oval tool and watching the numbers at the bottom of the screen to insure a circle) in yellow. This circle was blurred three times also. Using the "clone" brush, I then overlaid the tree on the yellow circle. This composite image was then pasted onto the large image with the lettering.
The entire image was then cropped, making sure that the blurred area was not cropped at the edge. It was saved as an interlaced gif with transparent background.
The Background Image
The background image used on this and some of the other Willowhill pages was created using a DOS program "Chaos." It is a large background, with three separate zig-zag traces on it. I cropped it just a little so that the purple lines would go clear to the edge. Later I tweaked it so that it appears continuous when used as a background image. There are only two colors in this image; black and purple. Image size is about 11.7K. The actual image is reproduced with a border around it below:
As you have noticed, the color scheme for the primary Willowhill Webspace pages is yellow, green and purple with a black background. The background color for the document is set to black. The background image itself also has a black background, but it was saved as a transparent color so that it could be used with any background color, if desired. This version of the image does not have a transparent background to avoid the document background showing through. (Does that make sense?)
Horizontal Lines
The green/yellow shaded horizontal lines were downloaded from Bill's Web Design Gallery, which no longer exists. Formerly, they provided backgrounds, bars, and clipart for web page design which were free for personal web pages. The lines I used are named yl03.gif and yl05.gif (note that the names contain a lower case letter "L" and not the numeral "1"). The lines are shaded in opposite directions, which is why there are two different lines. Another line from Bill's is pat22.gif shown below (which I used on the polymer clay page):
The following rainbow shaded line is from REALM GRAPHICS, which has a large selection of artwork that you can use on your pages. Contact them at http://www.ender-design.com/rg/
All these lines were used as downloaded, with no modifications.
The Cat
You will note that there is a cat on every primary Willowhill page, just as there is a cat around Willowhill almost anywhere you go. This image (cateyes.gif) was downloaded from http://www.ibiblio.org/gio/iconbrowser/. I did a search for "cat" and this is
one of the responses. The cat at the left is the original static gif. I don't know what the source of the animated version is but you can see it on the right. This one I found when I was trying to track down the source of the original. I don't care a whole lot for animated gifs, but this one is tempting!
E-Mail Symbol
The original E-Mail Icon (690.gif, shown at right) was downloaded from the "A+ Art Bars Collection, which also seems to have disappeared. The original blue color didn't look good with my color scheme, so once again I recolored the image using LView. I use a yellow tinted version on these pages (see below) but the original image is used on my polymer clay page. I use a differently tinted version at the bottom of Joyce's Jewelry and the writings of Sydney J. Van Scyoc pages.
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Copyright ©1996 & 2003 by Jim R. Van Scyoc
