Layout #145: African Vines

Layout #145: African Vines. Click here to return the layout listing.

Name : Xemnas
Index : No
Made : Shaza — December 08, 2007
Site : Standin’ In the Spotlight
Brushes : No
Shapes : Yes; Circles, Lines, Squares
Effects : Yes; Multiply, Hue/Saturation
Fonts : Lucida Bright, Apple Garamond, Arial and Sans-Serif for CSS
Navigation : Yes; Overlaps on the Side.
Artist/Comic : Lion King © Disney. Vectored and Colored
Original Picture from : Cleaned coloring book image

Process :
This layout was actually very easy comparatively since I love Lion King and could really put my heart into it. I was tired of constantly using bright and pastel colors, so I decided that I would go for a totally different type of mood: dark and vivid. Hence, I used much darker colors. I first cleaned up the image by simply running it through Live Trace in Illustrator. Then, I went ahead and vectored underneath, fixing lines and adding some nice shades here and there. This ended up working really well, though I realized much later that I messed up the color of the leaves around Simba, making them green instead of brown (which I didn’t change since that would make the layout much too brown).

After vectoring, I decided that I would make a footer layout since I really liked the vine the best, and wanted to make that the center of attention (remember, I was in my objects love-phase since the last three layouts), and wanted to do this. Since Kari’s fanlisting did not have overwhelming amounts of text or content, the footer navigation really worked out well- it was also something I wanted to try since I didn’t do CSS footer links with hovers before, which ended up being a bit tougher than I thought lol.

The only thing I regret in this layout is that it seems to give a feeling of something missing. Maybe I should have added a bird or something… But I was hitting the deadline and didn’t have time to figure it out. Also, the footer with Simba’s head was a bit troublesome since there was a lot of empty space, and I haven’t quite figured out how to do the bottom alignment with div as of yet…

Description :
Simba standing in the footer, with vines overhead as the header image. Links reside on the bottom with overlaps featuring screenshots in the little boxes.