One thing I've been working on for the site, in addition to the new Starlights (or Akisa Web) theme is a general upgrade. A new core version of drupal had come out, and several modules had updated since I first started to use Drupal. I took this as an opportunity to update the whole lot.

Now deninet is running Drupal 4.7.4. Several modules were updated, and a few new ones were added:

• Capcha - Was installed but never enabled. Updated.
• im - Never enabled. Removed.
• logintoboggan - Was enabled, but never really used. Removed.
• ljxp - Installed. It's about time someone made a Drupal to LJ crossposter!
• og - Disabled access control, it was a pain in the ass.
• search404 - Removed.
• taxonomy_breadcrumb - Never enabled, removed.
• taxonomy_browser - Never enabled, removed.
• taxonomy_theme - Was enabled early on, but disabled due to unpredictable behavior. Removed.
• textimage - Installed. Needed it for Capcha.
• weblinks - Installed. No use for it yet on the site.

All other modules were updated to the most recent release. All added modules were moved to modules/contrib to make it easier for me to manage them.

For added flair, I decided to upload the most recent version of the Starlights theme along with the update and set it as the default theme. There are still many bugs and elements that have yet ot be styled. Most of the bugs are with IE6 on Windows. Since MS is now endorsing IE7 for XP based machines, I'm giving IE6 a lesser priority. Besides, you should be really using FireFox anyways. ^_~

If you spot a bug and want to tell me about it, please stop by the Starlights Beta thread on the forum. Include a decription of the problem, your browser, and your platform.

Welcome to deninet5.1.

Akisa Web Theme #7Okay, so the site kinda ground to a halt for a while. The last three weeks I've gone from occasional artistic output, to absolutely nothing, to a few cryptic posts. Let me give you a quick run-down:

Three weeks ago I had a horrible, horrible weekend. My laptop suffered a strange library corruption that required a reinstall of windows. My Satellite radio broke, requiring a replacement. And finally, I got into a car accident in my new Kia Rio 5. As you can imagine, I was not happy about any of this. The rest of the week goes by and by Saturday, I have a pounding headache and can barely think or sleep. But Sunday, I'm nearly incapacitated, and by Monday I have a fever. Since I'm too busy at work to take a sick day, I worked from home until Friday. Then this week, I have an assignment from work for a client in Florida. This actually didn't turn out so badly, but it made recovery a bit difficult.

Now that I'm home and well enough to enjoy it, I'm beginning to get back my creative bearings. I've been slowly working on the Novella script and the new Akisa Web Theme. The scriptwriting isn't going as quickly as I wanted, mostly because it's a new medium and I'm being cautious. I'm hoping to have enough written to start posting some occasional episodes starting in January. I'm hoping to have the theme ready before then, so I'll have a theme to match the comics.

To the right is a mockup of the theme. I had to move some things around to make it position correctly, but I'm happy with the direction this is going. The design is simple, simpler even than the current CityLights2 theme. The key here was the center column. The fade out effect shown in the mockup gives the impression of someone reading a piece of paper by flashlight. This complements the night theme in the header nicely. The problem I see in the design is that the center column is going to be difficult to create graphics-wise. Each upper corner of the column needs an independent graphic that must be overlaid by text. This is not going to be a simple effect to achieve. I had some minimal success in doing that in Citylights2, but it's still clumsy. Hopefully some research will yield solutions.

Akisa Web Theme #6I've been having quite a bit of trouble with the new Akisa Web Theme, and unfortunately, there seems no end in sight. Still, I've finally made some headway.

By far the biggest problem I've had with the image is the background. Usually I only give terse attention to anything except the characters. For the most part, this approach works well for me. Eventually I have an idea of what the background should look like and I start drawing it. The downside of this method is occasionally, I foul things up badly.

This was one of those incidents.

This isn't the first time I've gotten stuck with a really good image I've drawn. There are more than a few (like this one) that have gone unfinished for months simply because I became stuck over some little detail. With the web theme, I felt the whole composition of the background was off. My friends gave me several suggestions on how to solve this dilemma, several of them very, very good. Some, such as Ms. Dolari (of Closetspace and A Wish for Wings fame), suggested a full digital approach. Others, such as my follow artist and Otaku Ratz, suggested scanning the image, editing out or altering the background, then drawing on a high quality printout.

In the end, I chose a combination of these strategies. Neither would solve the problem easily on their own. A full digital approach wouldn't work well due to the fact that all my artwork is hand shaded before I color it digitally. The shading takes on the texture of the paper and is very difficult to reproduce in a computer. Altering an already shaded image is flirting with disaster. Drawing on a printout also causes a noticeable loss of quality. It was last Saturday when I realized the obvious solution.

Instead of shading digitally or drawing on a printout, the sketch would be digitally composited only. This means that there are separate sketches for the character and for the background. The trick was to find a way to orchestrate the character sketch "layer" with the background sketch. My first thought was transparency cellulose, the kind used in overhead projectors. The problem is that most of them are made for laser printers, and not ink jets such as my own. There were available, but at a ridiculous $50 a pack. There had to be a better solution.

And there was. Wondering around office and craft stores, I happened upon a pad of tracing paper. The paper is see-through, printable, and can be used for quasi-digital and traditional purposes. Not to mention it was $3 for a high quality pad of 50 sheets. Did I mention they were on sale? Even after all of this, I still have not used to new technique I devised. The reason is that I had a completely different idea for the background. This one, unlike most of my artwork, is a full digital background. Furthermore, it was in color. My backgrounds are black and white both as a functional and stylistic decision. I don't plan to color my backgrounds in the future, but I make and exception for this image. While I didn't use the tracing paper method to create a background, I did use the digital compositing methods I would have used to crop and place the sketch of Akisa in the above image. That turned out to be far more successful than I imagined.

My next problem is to actually design the web part of the theme. Yesterday evening I spent several hours simply staring at the image trying to come up with an idea. One that I toyed around with involved using an old paper texture for the text area. This would be styled to give the impression that it was a single piece of paper lit by flashlight. Unfortunately, it wouldn't work for a dynamic medium such as a webpage. The formatting would simply be too difficult or limiting. The paper texture was also a bit overpowering to the text itself, making it difficult to read.

For now, I've put the image aside to work on other things. I'm hoping some time away from it will give me a fresh perspective. I may toy with it tomorrow evening or during this weekend to see if I hit upon anything interesting.

Akisa Web Theme #1-4So I've been stuck with this image since early this week. It seems that no matter what I do to the background, it's not what I want. Usually when I'm stuck on an image like this, I just set it aside hoping that I'll get back to it. To date, I've never returned to an image that I've set aside in this manner.

Some of these are really a shame, since the rest of the image is very, very good. It's the one detail that bothers me that seems to ruin the whole thing. In this case, I don't want to simply throw away the image or set it aside. I need this image in order to make the new web theme that I have in mind.

To the right is a composite of the last three versions. The forth version is a photoshopped suggestion by my friend and fellow Otaku, Ratz. The original idea of the sketch was to portray Akisa listening to her MP3 player. The flow of the image was more or less an isosceles triangle. The short side would be the wall on which Akisa is leaning, with the peak reaching into the background on the right. The problem is that the desk I had drawn in the background is out of place in this triangle.

You can see this clearly in the third image. The desk is too far up and too the right. Under most circumstances, I would be able to erase the desk and reset it to the proper location. The problem is that I didn't notice what was wrong until after I had "set" the line art. I don't ink my drawings for a few reasons. One, I'm prone to making mistakes with my drawing that are difficult to correct if I've done them in a permanent medium such as ink. Inking also takes a great deal of time that can be easily approximated with dark pencil lines and some contrast adjustment. Finally, I find the inking tends to "sterilize" the image. I find the messy pencil drawing has more feeling than an clean, inked line.

I can still erase the lines I used to create the desk, that isn't the problem. The problem is that the lines have a noticeable imprint on the paper, and will leave ghostly after-images in the shading step. I could correct some of these in post, but I'm concerned the modification would be apparent. Ratz suggested to simple take a hi-res scan of the image, move the desk, and reprint it. My initial tests don't look promising. There's noticeable loss of detail in the reprinted images. Whether or not that loss of detail will be apparent on the screen is something I haven't tested yet.

One idea I haven't tried yet is to do a digital composite of character and background. That is, I will draw a new background on complete new media with no character. I'd leave the current Akisa sketch as it is. In post, Akisa will be cropped out and superimposed on the scanned background image. This will create a complete image without a lot of modification. What would help this idea would be if I could print Akisa on a transparent material such as vellum or clear plastic. This would be used a guide for drawing the background. The problem is, I don't have a clue where to get something like that.

Update: It looks like a pad of Tracing paper will work smashingly, it prints out cleanly on my inkjet and is translucent enough to see through the image.

Akisa Web Theme #1Recently, I've had the desire to create a Novella-centric website theme for a while. The problem was that I hadn't a clue what to do for it. Then, while browsing the AnimeNfo page, my muse struck.

I really wish she was a little more consistent. She's prone to manic periods of activity followed by lengthy, mind-numbing absences. I had been working on site design ideas since June, and only now in October she has one that doesn't stink...

The image currently only shows Akisa, but has been roughly spaced for the real estate it will take up when it's complete. Akisa is shown sitting on her bed, listening to her MP3 player. The screen will be the brightest thing in the image and glow brightly. In the upper right corner will be the site name, "a denizen's entertainment".

Right now, this is more idea than actuality. I except this project to take more than a few weeks to complete. The image alone will take most of the week, and perfecting the web theme and its CSS will be even longer. Still, it's a start.