Linora Low » design

Christmas Is Coming

Linora Low — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:30:27 +0000

It’s the season of the year which i enjoy the most. I just have this happy and light feeling whenever Christmas is about to come around. Listening to christmas carols, special collection of songs sung by our favourite pop artist, to see all the snowy decor hung on the walls. Ohh just little silly things that are ‘suppose’ to represent christmas. It’s not about the presents under the christmas tree. It’s not about the cookies or the stockings or the chestnuts roasting by the fire (well we don’t have a fire here anyway). It’s a time to share, love and give. Hence I spent some time to make for you guys a wallpaper. My gift to ya’ll and my second gift will be coming up soon. Wait for 25th Dec.

This wallpaper is 1280x 800. If it can’t fit on your desktop let me know and I’ll make another one.. I should actually..Anyways. Right click on this to download Aronil Xmas Wallpaper and save the link as a jpg.

And a more simpler one.Same thing, right click here to download Aronil Xmas Wallpaper 2. Have fun!

I’m in WeLoveWP

Linora Low — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:54:43 +0000

One of my favourite sites to visit for some wordpress inspiration is WeLoveWP.com. It is basically a gallery filled with blogs that uses the wordpress structure and all of them either have some unique designs for their skins or something way graphicky. So I’m very very proud to say that Aronil.com has now been approved to be apart of that gallery. Hee hee yes I’m ecstatic. Adn guess what. Even better at the moment I’m now on the front page of the site. Woopa die doo It’s a thrill to see your design up on a gallery that showcases your stuff. Hehe.

Can you try and spot me?

Yeap. So if you want some great inspirations for your own blog design, WeLoveWP is one spot that you can get it…. Not cause I’m there.. just cause

Design Process

Linora Low — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 18:01:46 +0000

Took me a while but I’m now going to write the process on the evolution of the Aronil Phoenix Design. I was not very happy with my previous designs, cause it just didn’t represent me. The very first design I did.. i did in the wee morning hours atnd took me like 3 hours. So i’ll consider it a rushed job that was just to appease me for the time being. You are your worst client when it comes to trying to design something for yourself. It also took me a while to figure out what kind of theme I wanted to go with. After much deciding, I felt that it would be best to go with an oriental feel. My original designs had me designing up something that was more sketchy. I was thinking of doing something that more sketchbook like but that just seemed boring and it didn’t feel like me. So why not do something while the craze of china is still going on. Besides it’s closer with my inherent appeal for japanese and chinese elements. Which you can clearly see on the header and the footer. The phoenix design was the toughest part.

I had gone through a number of phoenix illustrations to get inspiration. One of them of course was the phoenix by Nick La. It helped a lot too that I found how to do glowing brush strokes and that became like the biggest kick off on the new design. Thats why there may be a bit of a psychedelic tone here and there. I had first drawn out my phoenix like so.

Then i took a picture of it and started to follow it on illustrator and photoshop. A lot of going back and worth between the two programs here. Drawing the bird and the tailed off lines were with the pen tool. And using a very thin and solid brush stroke with intensity on. Getting the glowy and dusty effect had to do with a number of layer styles.

The wings were another headache by itself. I couldn’t draw the wings right and Fang gave me a great suggestion. She gave the actual wings of a crane. and from there it was quite easy to tweak to how i wanted my wings. Sure I later found out that I had vector ready wings that i could use, but it didn’t have the same feel. I didn’t want my phoenix too scary and not too tame at the same time. She had to have that sense of freedom yet elegance, one would image a firey phoenix to have.

And why a phoenix? If you read Silver Phoenix is my name.. you’ll understand why. it’s another personalisation thing. After that is was all abotu searching for the right kind of elements to put in. I found a number of them on Istockphoto, shutterstock, scx and dreamstime. My favourite spots for free pictures or if i needed any inspiration. The footer had me using layers styles to get that effect. I first got the hill silhouette by drawing it on illustrator and using the wrinkle tool and setting the wrinkle to not such a high intensity. Then i brought over to photoshop and used the gradient fills with different versions of blending modes. Adding the trees and the torii (which is a japanese gate that is usually seen in a number of animes), were from various sources. Same like the header.

And that finally thats how Aronil.com evolved. See the process here. The tutorials used are here. 1. Glowing tails,

2. Dust particles

3. Rainbow

A Quick Note

Linora Low — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 18:57:29 +0000

It’s done..I’m finished with my version of the phoenix design for Aronil.com. My eyes are now terribly tired after starting at the screen for countless hours. My back is not great cause the chair i’m sitting in is probably the worse working chair ever. I’m yawning a lot. But boy am I satisfied and I hope from here on it just gets better. I’ll give a bigger and longer update on the new design in a while,

The Christmas Look

Linora Low — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:19:54 +0000

Well I spent quite a number of house just revamping it for the season. But i’m finally satisfied.. for now.. lol Here’s what the new look will look like once it’s up on the server…I know looks a bit all over the place.. so please bare with it for a bit. I don’t to spedn too much time redoing it lol as I want to revamp the whole thing later on. I’m fine with the look for now, and heehe come come it’s the season!! You gotta love this holiday.. Christmas is always a favourite of mine and now a song! From AroniL to everyone else out there, blogger, reader and koalas… Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas and the countdown begins… hehe 6 more days left.