Layout #16: A Swordsman & his Sword

Layout #16: A Swordsman & his Sword. Click here to return the layout listing.

Name : A Swordsman and his Sword
Index : Yes
Made : Shaza & Hana – 2004
Site : The-Oro.com
Brushes : No
Shapes : Yes; rectangle, line, grid
Effects : Outer glow, opacity, stroke, drop shadow, smudge, gradient, gradient, liquify
Fonts : Yes; Katana and Sans Serif for Css
Navigation : Image Map
Artist/Anime : Nobuhiro Watsuki/Rurouni Kenshin
Original Picture from : Screenshot done by us
Process : First, we took our DVD’s and ran it on my dad’s DVD ROM. We took a screencapture which turned out to be 600×480 Pixels (Obviously too small). Next we opened up Adobe and enlarged the sword and cleaned it up by vectoring it. Since the sword was the main part of the layout we cut it out of the main picture and pasted it on an appropriate sized canvas. The color of the background was dark blue taken from the sky of the original screenshot. Afterwards we used the grass brush for the bottom of the sword and we added image effects to it. The dark blue looked very plain so we added the original screenshot and enlarged to a very big size and opacified it in the background. This made the layout look almost momentous. After all this, we added the sword quote that Shaza made up (and Hana helped a little :P). Later, we added the Ishin Shishi flags on the side and in the background to make it look almost like a photo picture. Then Shaza thought- “It looks weird on the side” and thus she cut out the Japanese letters and displayed them vertically to fill up the negative space. Since she was unsure of which letters went together, she sent Hana to check on the wallscroll in her room. Finally, to give finishing touches we added the menu with red and yellow, then liquified some Kenshin anime images cut out to make the banner. The banner and the links were all done with the Katana font. For the coding, unlike Version 1, we made it much more complicated. Shaza made the overlaps (2 hours) while Hana sliced the image (3 hours- she’s slow :P). Finally we added the iframe, but as we predicted the layout looked really horrible with the iframe in 800×600, but we decided that it was okay either way, since not many sites care about 800×600 anyways, we tried to do our best for them ^_~. Finally Hana made the css file and we fixed all the nasty coding that was leftover from the old layout so that it would be easier for us in the future.The End of our Brilliance.
Description : A large vector sword on the side, sticking into the grass which continous onwards. very lonely appeal and very dark sky. Japanese Katana writing on the very left hand side in yellow and purple. Red banners on the very side corner / back and a liquified banner on the top. Overlapping links, and quote on the bottom.

This Layout is Downloadable: Click Here to Download