Starbright Illustrations (blog)

As I mentioned in my last post, all the science fiction sketches, designs, art, 3D renders and illustrations have always been the most popular element of both the Starbright Illustrations main site and the Starbright Illustrations blog. It seems that now might be a great time to refocus the site towards this sort of work, to make the site more unified and understandable, but hopefully still vibrant, varied and interesting.

As part of this process I’ve been redesigning the site to have a white background, simpler layout and new logo. The first of these new-design pages is taking shape here. I’ creating the pages in Kompozer, and one of the advantages of using such a simple app is that it creates nice simple web pages that download quickly. At lest they should download quickly as long as I keep my eye on the sizes of all the images I’m creating. When I remember I use the Save foe Web extension for GIMP to make sure the illustrations are as small as possible.

Installing it was a bit of an effort with Mandriva Linux however. I remember with the old Windoze machine – before it died – all I had to do was drop the extension into the right GIMP folder. With Linux I had to download extensions to my operating system and type in different lines of code, using Google to look up how to react to the error messages that were spat out in a little black window when the extension repeatedly failed for various esoteric reasons.

But as soon as the new look has spread across the site a little, it’ll be straight back to sketching spaceships and other bits of sci-fi hardware and working these designs into completed illustrations.