Banner Day

I spent a few hours today pushing pixels around for my new banner - enough time that I figured it was worth a post in itself. Here it is ...

My new banner in all it's glory. 

It's not quite right yet - as you can see up top, some of the best bits are covered up by my title text. I'll see about fixing that later.

Yellow Jacket working image

All the parts of this image are on separate layers in Paint.Net so that sort of change won't be too hard to do. 


Here are the working images, and the original images (pretty sure I found the right ones).

A not-quite-final ...

Yellow Jacket original image

... and the original.

Guillotine original image

All the mini images were put through the "Ink Drawing" filter in PDN to give them a more stylized look.





A final layer below.

Two minis on one layer

Spider original image
 (photo by Sam "Wasp" Snell)

Spider working image

The original "Jumping Spider" photo was given a perspective rotation using GIMP. The original was too small without resizing, and this me stretch the top and shrink the bottom, getting the whole effect in the picture. The jump-jet splash looks a bit flattened those, maybe I can tweak that too.

Vindicator final image.

The Vindy is the only one where I couldn't find the original image. I obviously took the photo, and this mini does feature here, but I guess I never posted any other photos of it. I might have over-done the Ink Drawing tool here, and I need to clean up the edges, which look messy in the final banner.

Hex grid original image

I tried rotating some images of a hex grid, but I found a Hex Grid renderer for GIMP that worked better. I made a REALLY big grid, gave it a perspective rotation, then cropped out the over-stretched parts. GIMP is a good tool, and I'm glad this gave me a chance to start using it.

Random Walks

The random walks image is derived from the same spreadsheet I used for my Monopoly post way back when. This image is a just a screencap from Excel. The random walks were in my original banner too, but with the addition of the hex grid I cut down to just four lines, and made them heavier. Here is the old banner for comparison (below).

Dice Original image (photo by Maximaximax)

These dice are the only part of the banner I didn't create myself - Thank You WikiMedia! I might take a stab at photographing some of my own dice if I get ambitious, but these will do nicely for now.

Finally, thanks to Steve and PiP for prodding me in the comments to get this done. It good when friend bug you to do stuff. :-)