Layout #132: A Wizard's Day
Layout #132: A Wizard's Day. Click here to return the layout listing.
Name : A Wizard’s Day
Index : No
Made : Shaza — June 24, 2007
Site : Sarah’s Exit Page
Brushes : No;
Shapes : Yes; Rectangles
Effects : Yes; Multiply, Vivid Light, Level
Fonts : Pepsi, Engravers MT, Sans-Serif & Arial for CSS
Navigation : Yes; Overlaps from the Falling Stars
Artist/Comic : Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle
Original Picture from : My personal scans
Process :
This layout took around 6-7 hours total probably. There was no ONE image used, but a series of images, perhaps 15-20 total. I used the sketches in the Howl’s Moving Castle artbook, starting from the bottom footer, and then worked my way up. I wanted one of those simple layouts, and in the beginning I thought I would blend out the sides to a white background, but decided against it because it would ruin the effect and I hate blends in general. I cut out different characters from the artbook, changing the hue to match with the rest, and applying specific effects accordingly.
I made the sides of the layout slightly different colors. Only if you look closely can you see that the background on the left hand side is different from the one on the right hand side. Sadly enough, I realized the IE reads the centering property differently, and thus it didn’t work that much on IE 6. Oh well. The top of the banner was the same thing, except I used the shooting stars from the artbook, cutting them out accordingly. I think I really loved the top part the best, even though I think it became a bit crowded with links due to the links everywhere. But I really love the shooting stars the best. Then, I decided to cut off the top with a shape, that blended to both the different colors of the backgrounds with a gradient so it would be less noticeable. I used the castle to show a bit more movement for that part.
The basic point was to capture a nice happy scene from Howl’s Moving Castle and to highlight Miyazaki’s wonderful sketches, especially since I knew that I had not seen anyone use them in a layout before. I really had a lot of fun playing around with it.
Description :
The point of this layout was to use the sketches from Howl’s Moving Castle art book. It basically is one of the footer layouts with the main scene on the bottom, and just the navigation and all on the top. The navigation consists of falling stars.
