Past Updates: [3]
22 November, 2007 Thursday::Icontastic!
Another pretty big mini update. Make sense?
New additions:-(13) icons: (6) LotR-related, (2) Brad Pitt, (2) Angelina Jolie, (1) Cate Blanchett, (1) Viggo Mortensen, and (1) featuring Dorothy's ruby slippers.
-(4) icon textures.
-(1) 800x600 texture.
-(2) more link back buttons.
And also, please comment today's journal entry!
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19 November, 2007 Monday::EXPLODING UPDATE!!!!!
I didn't think I could possibly do this much for Naeolia within a week! Well, if you haven't all noticed, I have a new layout! You know what? I'll just give you a running list of all the new additions:-(3) icons: (2) featuring Viggo Mortensen, and (1) feat. Um Junghwa.
-(3) 800x600 textures.
-(1) new tutorial on image mapping.
-(2) poems, located in my portfolio section.
-(1) more link back button.
Also, let me welcome Naeolia's top affie, Kikki's DreamBox, Krystel's new website. Everything's looking lovely (makeshift fish header courtesy of Naeolia) so please pop over and take a look. Alright then, that's enough for now. All the coding from this layout has been driving me nuts.
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11 November, 2007 Sunday
Very productive day today! I made (5) icon textures and (2) more link back buttons (both 100x35). Honestly, the textures were not very hard, but took a long time because I was fiddling with 10 million layers the entire time. I used pictures of nebulas and cropped them to icon size, and then used my own flourishes. For textures, I don't ever use resources created by others; it would take away the entire, "I made this!" claim, wouldn't it?
I'll tell you what I did use, though: preset gradients, preset brushes, and preset filters. Everything preset. Except for the swirly brush at the top of the 3rd texture; I created that by using super swirly cursive font put together, and then layer properties. As for the kind of gridlike accents, I came upon those in the weirdest way! So I was just kind of zoning while sitting in front of my laptop the other day and I was just kind of selecting, and unselecting one of my link back buttons absentmindedly. This was in IE of course, since Mozilla's selected images are just kind of plain gray. But IE's selections have little diagonal lines streaking across, and I was like, "Oh cool! I could so screencap that and make a tiny little grid!" And then in Photoshop, I was zooming in and out, and that was looking really cool, so I screencapped the already screencapped selected linkie at different zoom ranges, and I got all these cool little different versions of griddy. So awesome (decided to use a word other than 'cool' . And then I pasted all the 6 mini grids onto one white background, and saved it. So today, I was feeling kind of drowsy and stuff so I sat down in front of my laptop again, and opened all my fantastic nebulae photos and yeah, already explained the rest above. 
As for the linkies, they're not much, I just cropped pieces of the icon textures and put 'Naeolia' on them. All right. OH YEAH! I learned how to image map! I was sitting in front of the computer for an HOUR (maybe more) going, What the hell?? How does this work? (I knew how to image map in PSP, but I've forgotten by now) And then, my stroke of genius came and I got it! Yeah. And best of all, I kind of learned it on my own, filling in the x and y coordinates, so no credit link. You know what I'm gonna do? I'm going to write up an image mapping tutorial. It was so hard for me to find one on the web, I just kind of took it out on my own. Also, I didn't want to download all that other crap about the image map programs. Ok, well I'll get to work on that. Also, I'm working on a new layout, I just need to find some inspiration and ideas. Well, enough. 
lovingly, nicole
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