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I’m having a little bit of an issue with some plugins so I’ve simply turned them off for now but this means that the old layout wont work and there isn’t any real reason for me to fix it since I’ve started a new layout which I want to get round to finishing some point this year lol.

I’ve done a few new pieces of art work which you can see below and there is also a sneaky peak at the new layout.

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Thanks to the AFA awards I’ve started doing some art work again and even started rebuilding lucid fanart I’ve got some cool looking designs, I’ve just got to piece it together, it may take a while as I’m making it responsive, and combining the two programs I use to run Lucid Fanart into one. So hopefully soon I’ll be able to show you a brand new site. But for now how about some brand new artwork.

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I see it a lot of the times on forums where people are having problems with their layouts or with the new staff at my work its generally the first thing we have to teach them, there are many problems that can occur when you apply floating div’s but 9 times out of 10 the clearfix will fix it! That’s how fool proof it is. If you can remember to use this you will find that coding sites will be much easier.  Below is an example of the most basic error so you can see what I mean.

Live Preview [opens in new window]

So you must be thinking if this clearfix fixes so many problems it must be a pretty hefty piece of code, well no its really simple actually:

.clearfix:after { content:'.'; display:block; height:0; clear:both; visibility:hidden }
.clearfix { display:inline-block }
* html .clearfix { height:1% }
.clearfix { display:block }

That is all it is! Its CSS so its cross browser compatible, which if you’re in the web design industry you will find everything needs to be these days as you can see there are several different rules, these are as the first one .clearfix:after won’t be accepted by all browsers so there are separate rules that if all else fails the other rules will work.

There is even a shorter version but this hasn’t been tested on ie6 but it works all the way down to ie7 so if you’re like me and don’t really care about the people using ie6 as if they can’t update their browser they shouldn’t be on the internet (either because they are at work or they obviously don’t care about the quality of the websites they visit) you can use the code below.

.clearfix:before, .clearfix:after { content: ""; display: table; }
.clearfix:after { clear: both; }
.clearfix { zoom: 1; }

Ok so we know what we need to put into the style sheet but if you don’t put it in your markup correctly it’s just not going to work, so to make sure we know how to put it into the markup we need to understand what it does.

Like I said above what you are basically doing is putting a full stop after all the floating div’s that are causing you problems, to illustrate this I’ve mocked up a problem I’ve seen in the past and generally the most common problem.  Where you can see the wrapper div doesn’t fully extend the two floating div’s. You may think it’s not a problem now, but if you wanted to add a footer or add a background to the wrapper div you’re going to have a problem.

By simply adding the class of clearfix to the surrounding div you can see that the div now extends around the entire layout which is great if you want to create sections to sites you can clearly define the area while not being limited to what you can do within the area.

I have created a wireframe of the homepage of Lucid Fanart to show you how it would look without the clearfix and the simple css has saved me a lot of time, and a lot of screwy hacks trying to make everything fit into the space perfectly. As you can see from the example the dark black lines are the areas where I’ve put the clearfix and you can see a difference in the way everything lines up I haven’t even set positions on things I’ve simply written out the markup and done a few lines of CSS and it simply falls in to place.

Live Preview [opens in new window]

I hope you found this tutorial useful and that you are able to use the clearfix, if you need any help please post below and I’ll talk you through it, if you have an example please add it in and I’ll try and help specifically to your design.

The post The Clearfix appeared first on Lucid Fanart.

I also want to thank Destiny, FioNat and Sasha for the beautiful Halloween Gifts… yet another thing I slipped up on I will be doing a Christmas gift for everyone though so I can make up for it with that I am taking some time off soon and I think I’m gonna use the time to work on some things.

I mentioned above I have some wicked new affiliates check them out.

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its difficult sometimes especially in my job doing art work for really boring things like… wire products (yes I said wire) among other really boring things (I’m sure most of you are in a similar boat), and then come back and work on other art work even if it is enjoyable it can still become a chore doing it all day and evenings, but I have to say the AFA awards have given me such a boost in confidence and drive! and Ehlwyen I’m so glad I got back into Buffy Forums its been such a help for my inspiration and education, I have to say I rely a lot on you guys for inspiration especially with the forum challenges and giving me a reason to keep going with the art work if it wasn’t for Buffy Forums and the community here I probably would have packed it in years ago!!!!

and I’m totally with you Amber there were a few artists I didn’t know about before the AFA such as Xinyi, Sophie, Clement, and JJ to name a few but I’ve saved all their art work and got it on my wallpaper rotator I’m so glad I joined in the AFA this year its been really uplifting and I hope everyone feels the same way. so thank you SayJay for brining us all together and enhancing the already fantastic Buffy Forums Art Community!
Demetreas (aka me)

Not only have I won lets count…:16!!! awards!! I got an email today from SayJay at Radiance a website I’ve stalked for god knows how long and I’ve been.. lol I say I’ve been my site has been awarded site of the month! I just hope everyone knows how much I appreciate the consideration for these awards! and I don’t want it to go to my head but its been a great couple of weeks for me in the art world I just have to keep it up!

check out all my amazing awards I received from AFA 2011:

10th Best overall artist!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2nd place Vampire group
3rd place Sup/Fan character
4th place Techniques: Text
7th place Sup/Fan episodic
7th place Techniques: Stocks
8th place Celeb: Male
10th place Sci-Fi episodic
10th place Vampire character
10th place Emotions: Drama
14th place Techniques: Colour
RU place Vampire episodic
RU place Emotions: Love
RU place Techniques: Manip

[nggallery id=11]

I also wanted to give a little update on what I’ve been working on I noticed I’ve not been doing that lately I’ve just been doing site of the month which is on hold this month as I wanna do more artwork.

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I hope to be making some more artwork soon I keep looking at the Buffy Forums Challenges and they all look great I’ve started walls several times but I keep running out of steam but I wanted to keep up to date so here is my SOTM for June

Reason: For June, I have decided to make Beyond Hope my site of the month. Beyond Hope is a beautiful site with lot of detail and care taken with it. I love the layout that is currently up on the site, some of my favourite actresses feature in this layout but I think best of all this layout draws in so much detail [read more]

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Reason: I’m totally loving Shadow of the Day at the moment, not only does Marilyne have an amazing site, the layout she has to her site always has consistency which I find important with a site, the navigation is really easy to follow, and the designs are always really delicate and well thought out. She has a real flare for Merlin art work… [Read More]

I’ve also been awarded site of the month at two sites last month and this month, I am so proud get get these awards. Last month Christine from Surrender Your Soul awarded me site of the month check out my cute twilight style award. And this month the wonderful Brittany has awarded Lucid Fanart as site of the month and look at my awesome Being Human USA award.

It has been a fantastic month for me not only did I get the two awesome site of the month awards, but I got some art awards over at Buffy Forums. I got Honourable Mention over at the Angelogy challenge for my Legend of the Seeker wallpaper Angel of Death. I have also got 1st Place W00T! for my Angel Poster.

As you can see my last post was a tutorial, I was actually quite surprised when I saw my poll that a lot of you wanted to see more tutorials. I personally think I suck at making tutorials but I’ll try my best. I’m gonna work my way through the Adjustment Layers for Photoshop tutorials, and maybe add in a few wallpaper tutorials when I make new wallpapers I find it difficult to go back and redo wallpapers becuase a lot of the time I just do trial and error its the only advice I give people really play with photoshop and you can’t go wrong.

Not sure what kind of HTML and CSS or PHP tutorials I can give you but if you guys have any ideas or if there is anything you’ve seen on my site you would like to try for yourself just make a note of it in my comments and I’ll make a tutorial on it.

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How to find the Adjustment Layers

There are several ways you can access the adjustment layers and depending on which version of photoshop you use it will differ and the panels will differ slightly I’m using photoshop cs5

First way you can access adjustment layers is by going to the menu bar at the top of your window and clicking on Image > Adjustments

The next way to access it is at the bottom of your layers palette, the icon of a circle cut into two and coloured black and white is the logo for adjustment layers.

The third way is for the CS4 and CS5 users and only if you have set up your workspace this way you can create quick links and put them anywhere I’ve stuck mine next to my layers palette so its easy access.

Now we know where they are lets start using them.

Ajustment Layers: Levels Palette

For this tutorial a pretty simple one, the Levels palette, with Levels you can modify the highlights, shadows, midtones and you can also target your basic RGB and improve your primary colours within your images. First get your photo, I like to always work with large images simply becuase its easier to reduce images to the size you want than increase them, so you will need to find a great gallery with lots of high quality images such as one of my all time favourite galleries Pretty as a Picture run by Dana of Chosen Art. I’ve chosen an old Buffy season one photo as a lot of the old Buffy images are quite dark and have a lot of mood lighting already applied to it, and with this tutorial I’ll try and show you how to create your own mood lighting.

Okay so first things first lets see what the Levels palette actually looks like and what’s on it.

Preset Levels: these are defaults set by Adobe for easy and quick modifications generally these are very slight changes like brining out the highlights or darkening the shadows.

Colour Targeting: this dropdown allows you to target RGB which for the newbies means Red, Green and Blue those are your basic primary colours when it comes to digital images, and before anyone says primary colours are Red, Yellow and Blue, that is for things like paint and colours, RGB primary colours are for anything to do with light and everything digital are displayed on monitors or projects which use light rather than actual colours. To modify all the colours without actually giving priority to a single colour use the RGB option.

Image Level Chart: this is a histogram of the exposure levels on your image on your left side you have the shadows and on the right you have the highlights as you can see the image I chose is quite dark so it has more  pixel density on the left hand side telling us that it is a dark image, and if the image was over exposed there would be more on the right hand side.

Under the chart you have your points which are adjustable and moving them along the histogram to increase or reduce the depth of the selected point.

Shadow/Brightness: I don’t generally use this tool as it simply adjusts the amount of darkness and brightness in the image I much prefer to target specific areas… therefore I don’t know much about this tool so I’m not going to go into it in this tutorial.

Lets begin the tutorial by modifying a colour within the image. There are two main colours in this image, Blue, and Yellow so lets play on those colours and try and give this a eerie blue mood.

First select the colour targeting dropdown and select blue this give you a new histogram which represents the amount of blue in your image if we move the highlights and the midtones up the scale a bit we can change the turquoise blue to a much deeper blue and you can also see that her dress has turned a bit more blue even though there wasn’t much blue in there anyway this is becuase we are changing the highlights and there will have been a small bit of blue tone within the yellow.  [click the image to see a full size colour comparison between the original and our amendments.]

Now we have a blue image, we can also use this method to remove the blue from the image.

By moving all the points towards the other end of the scale we can almost completely remove any of the blue within the image this is a great way of quickly adjusting an odd unwanted colour in a picture.

With the levels palette you can combine the different colour targets together to create a new tone to the image. If you now use the colour target dropdown and select Red we can add some red to the image, there wasn’t much red in the image to begin with so this will be a good example of how levels creates colour from the colour that is already present in the image. If you repeat the same sort of action we did to bring out the blue in the image we can convert some of the yellow/green images to an orangey feel [click image below for a full preview of green to orange photo]

However personally I prefer to use the levels tool to keep most of the colours as they are but bring out their natural colours to make things stand out more such as the brightness of the image, the easiest thing to use it the RGB setting as this will not modify the colours already set in the photo.  So let’s delete that adjustment layer and start afresh. (a good note about adjustment layers are the fact they are independent from the actual photo which means you can adjust the image with out actually affecting the image so if you decided you don’t like something you don’t have to start again this helps when you start using more than one adjustment layer.)

Okay so I’ve lightened the image a bit reducing the amount of shadows by moving the highlights points up the scale and I’ve also soften the shadow, in the general colours by moving the midtones point up the scale. I wanted to keep my shadows black however so I’ve moved the shadow point down the scale a bit

And there we go, your basic adjustment layers palette. View the final outcome of the tutorial or click on the image in this post to view a larger version of the comparisons

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So what’s new??

Well firstly a brand new design, and I wonder if you guys have noticed the background(s) lol I’m really happy with that I tried to get it to work on my old sever however it didn’t want to work? but it does now so hopefully no one will get bored with this design as it changes so often and I can add new ones at any time.

I’ve kept most of everything the same as it worked really well last time, easy to navigate and for people to contact me.

As I have changed my domain name I’ve got brand new link back buttons and I have to say I much prefer them from the last set I had… although I’ve recreated some of my favourite ones, I plan to add to these too in the upcoming months.

If you take a look at my gallery I’ve modified the design of this greatly, before I tried to keep it looking as close to the blog design as possible but as a gallery I felt it needed more space so I’ve ditched the sidebar and given the gallery full width of the site. I still have a few things I need to do to the gallery like fill in all the information which is going to be a BIG job, I wanted to get it done before I set the site live but a few things came up and my time was shortened but I can do it over time. I have taken off the comments system on the gallery as I was getting an awful lot of spam going through there but I have left on the rating system so you can add whether you like it or not there but I will still be updating this blog where people can comment on new artwork.

I hope you all like the new site, and I hope  to get new art work on there asap.

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