Popped out a new desktop last night/this afternoon, with a surprising burst of help from Tom. I was toying around with a pretty flat, simple, but pretty photo, Leia standing against a white (well, grey) background, white ground. I'd thrown some transparent stripes across the thing, added in some texture, some color, and couldn't quite sort out what to do with it. Tom decreed that the orange-blue gradient I had worked in just made it look like I couldn't decide whether to make the colors warm or cool...uh, which was exactly the case, to be honest. (In the end, I wound up building on the slight greenish tinge to the original.) He also commented that the concrete texture I'd used looked too much like stars, and given the context it was too heavy-handed. If I was going for a spaceship look, I should put in boxes for all the random panels and things that make up ships in the Star Wars universe. So I threw in some outlines really quick, and in like under a minute, I had a basic shape that looked astonishingly GOOD.

So, hell, I went with it. Added in some more detail, and threw in a different texture to sort of make the floor. Tom's suggestion to scootch Leia over to the right more was, in fact, correct, though it was a pain in the neck to do when I was so far into the thing already. I also had to re-work her shadow, and stretch out the background, and do all sorts of somewhat tedious tweaking to make things do what I wanted, underneath all my embellishments.

But I am oddly proud of this, simple as it looks. I can't recall ever inventing an actual background like this, and basic and plain though it is, I think it actually kind of works. Looking at the rough edges I was throwing around the thing, Tom said I should make it look like old, beat-up film...which is actually exactly what I had in mind by that point. Of course, ye old 35mm negatives are probably not in use in the SW universe, sooo I was stuck being a little more generic.

...I had finished this earlier today, but looking at it on my desktop, I finally had to go in and change the font. I was originally going to hand-write it myself, via my tablet, but had some trouble making my writing look like boy-writing. I can never quite manage to change how my "e"s look. So I went with a utilitarian computerish font, with the thought of like a label-maker type of look. But about half an hour ago, I decided it just wasn't happening, it made it look like it was dug out of a Lucasfilm archive, not Han's dresser drawer, which is what I'd wanted. So, a font-hunt it was, with me re-locating Fonts for Peas, a treasure-trove of real person handwritings. <3

Tom actually hasn't seen the script-bit at the bottom yet, I'm pretty sure he'll think it too cheesy, but I like it. His suggestions were 1) a blaster hole in the wall beside her (which looked ridiculously realistic, starfield and all, done with a few clicks of a oil stain brush), and 2) gansta-style graffiti on the wall, with an arrow pointing to her, reading "I'd tap that". (I grabbed the tablet pen and a watery looking brush, and made my attempt - Startled Tom: "You are WAY too good at that!")



...really, I feel kind of like I've wasted today, though I shouldn't. I made Tom a breakfast, I went out and bought myself a new pair of jeans (since my favorite pair is beginning to die), I worked on two other drawings in Photoshop (that are still in-progress, one's just not done and the other I'm angry at), I printed out a bunch of recipes to make for next week, aaaaand managed to wash all but like one of my stacks of dirty dishes. Took two loads, but I am caught up again. It's my day off, that should be plenty enough, right? I have a nasty hunch that the reason I feel unfulfilled is because I left work yesterday without having finished the things I'd been assigned the day before *that*. Granted, it was more than anyone would've finished in a day, it was busy yesterday *and* I was scheduled in the basement, where I had customers to watch, and about everything that needed doing was upstairs. Also, the banner isn't needed until, literally, June, and the rest were all random small things for the store, like making new stickers for the colored pencil display. Why on earth do I feel guilty over not finishing it all??

(Tom thinks I'm insane for caring as much as I do about things at work. I probably am, to a point. But rationalize as much as I might, I still feel a slight knot in my stomach today, and watched my phone in case someone from the store should call about something. sigh.)


edit: It occurs to me that I should probably mention, for the inanely curious, that the date "written" on the wallpaper is only half made-up. I wound up going onto Wookiepedia (yes that is really its name...Tom thinks it's awesome) and figuring out the dating system used in Star Wars. Turns out that the whole calendar system got changed like 20ish years after the Empire fell, so I had to look up the *old* calendar system. Turns out there were several. I figured Han would probably use the one the Empire was using, since that probably would've been the most pervasive one at the time. Of course, there were two different systems of years being used even within *that*... I should really leave fandom details like this for Tom to sort out next time. xp