tomorrow will be better.

[an illegible mess.]

i promise.

hello everyone! i'm a newbie at graphics and such, meaning i'm not one of those fancy photomanipulating people with photoshop and all that fancy crap you use to make AMAZING banners. haha, no. i'm just very simplistic and use regular old gimp 2.6. i became interested in banner making a couple months ago ever since i got gimp. i've been practicing photomanipulating ever since and know my way around on gimp.

so, let's get to the gallery part, shall we?

this is in no particular order. i guess maybe oldest to newest? all the pictures from the first page of my photobucket album LOL. (note, they're not that old. maybe a couple weeks? my older stuff is quite embarrassing...)

some kind of wallpaper? ha, i was playing with the gradients on gimp and i got this.

cute little sticky note kind of thing i did. :3

something i did for someone offline.

banner for another site.

vent banner, i guess.

christmas banner for a site i own. :3

banner i did for a friend's site.

banner for my personal use.

banner for a friend of mine.

banner for my story on here.


that's mainly it for now! i will update it if i make any more.

comments? questions? insults?​

 

[moments.]

Sorry it took me so long to get around to posting here, I wanted to give you a massive tl:dr post on most of your stuff, but I was too busy for that...

Anyways, as a first little tip which seems to occur in a lot of your pieces. Be careful with text. Typography is very difficult to pull off in a way that doesn't detract from the piece, is easy to read and with a font which compliments the style and aesthetic of the rest of the piece, and I can see you've tried to work around these things, but have fallen into some common pot holes. Firstly, lowering the opacity on text is rarely a good idea unless it is a duplicate used as a shadow behind it or something. In those two pieces with the huge big quote in the background with lowered opacity, it is impossible to read it all, and honestly just distracts from the image in the background. It is nearly impossible to work in a quote that large on a piece that isn't exclusively typography, so my only criticism would be to remove it completely.

Another thing I see you like doing is putting the text right in a corner. As a general rule, this isn't the best thing to do because it draws attention away from the focal point. Always keep the text close and compact with whatever your focal point is, if it looks strange and you can't find a good position, just remember that not every piece needs text. Often a tag or a forum banner will look cleaner and more polished without text.

I'm not sure if you are familiar with the rule of thirds (google it), but it basically refers to the placement of things in a canvas so that it sits in the most dynamic position. A lot of your tags are set up awkwardly and feel unbalanced simply due to placement of the stock images. Houndoom, Ratata and the Exorcist one are all examples of this. None of them are completely centred which is good, but they are too far away from the centre, and the Houndoom one needs to be moved up as well a bit.

Lastly, as a very little point; try not to rely on scan lines so much as an effect. They are pretty old school, and while that isn't a bad thing, the novelty of them has worn off and they aren't an impressive or really strong effect to include in every piece. If you can find a way to mix it up a bit, that's all good, but otherwise it is probably safer just to leave them off.

If you want any comments on specific pieces I can do that, I realise I kind of rambled on general things, but that's a start, if you post more I will be more in depth. :)