Elucidation Art

Immortal Memories SotM Sept

Dee — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 18:25:24 +0000

Unfortunately this is almost a week late, I was on holiday last week an although I didn’t go abroad, which I never get to do anyway (*grumble*) I’ve been down south away from my computer so I’m very sorry for the delay but I would love to announce my Site of the Month September 2010 as Immortal Memories, I have been a huge fan of Monica for ages, and her artwork keeps getting better!

Some of you may have seen my Birthday Bundle I put up, I’m keeping an eye on the poll at the bottom of the site, so please keep voting, and this bundle came as a result of the poll, so if you want to download it you can download it here or view the individual downloads in the gallery.

Reason: I Love Immortal Memories, I have for a very long time, Monica has such a clean and fresh style of fanart, each piece is clear and high quality, the best images with the best textures, I love the crisp feel to her art work. Not only does Monica have an amazing fanart site with helpful donwloads which I have used over the years, but she also has an amazing gallery of images, it is so hard to find quality images especially of TV shows usually they are small or poor screencaps from the tv, [read more]

I have also done a few pieces of art work over the month of August W00t I told you I would lol.

Freebie Pack

Dee — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 20:55:43 +0000

Nearly another month since my last update, but this is a special month for me as it is my birthday tomorrow, and I wanted to do something special for elucidation, I see other community sites doing freebies and bundles so I thought I’d make some freebie stuff that people can use, also becuase this month someone opted for freebies on the poll at the bottom of the page.

[5 mb zip file]

In this bundle you get my all time favorite gradients, I have three in this bundle that I have used all the time but I’ve never put them in to a gradient set till now.

- Two tone set which has various tones that fade into a similar tone [view gradient]
- There is also a a HDslr set which are bright red and orange gradients which I have been using to help me recreate HDR style photographs [view gradient]
- And my favorite one which I have called heaven and earth because it combines earth tones and sky tones to bring out the colours in photographs which have both sky and other features in it [view gradient]

I have also added some photographs I have taken of torn paper, I always find it hard to find torn paper that is big enough to fit on my wallpapers, the torn paper in this bundle is very large and maybe a little blury in section but the size of each piece is at least 1920px in width or height depending on whether it is landscape or portrait which should be big enough for almost all wallpapers (15 photos in total) [view photo set]

and finally I have made some textures out of the paper stock photographs (8 Textures in total) [view texture]

you can download the bundle here or you can have a look at my gallery and download each part individually.

[5 mb zip file]

August Already!!

Dee — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 16:42:43 +0000

Wow July really flew by, I have been so bogged down with work I haven’t had chance to do a single piece of art work… ok probably a big fib but I have been so tired from working that I haven’t had the energy to spend all day on the computer and come home and spend all night on the computer as well, this is one of the draw backs of finding a job in something that you enjoy doing as a hobby it doesn’t make it an enjoyable hobby, as well as draining all the inspiration out of you… but enough whining, I vow to make at least one piece of art work every week of August, and by George I will do it lol.

One new affiliate this update, so I would like to welcome Reviews Gone Askew to Elucidation Art

Since its a new month there is a new Site of the Month: Vision award, and this month is dedicated to the hard work and beautiful artwork of Bre at Primordial Souls

Reason: I have been a fan of Bre at Primordial Souls for a long time now. I love how she presents her work and how unafraid she is to try something new, the different way she experiments with light and colour blows me away. She has an amazing skill of bring different images together, her work always looks so delicate and intricate every time I look at a piece of work by Bre… [read more]

Chosen Art Site of the Month July

Dee — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 20:40:00 +0000

Its been a month already, where does the time fly, well I have just put the finishing touches to the new site of the month award which I am going to award to Dana over at Chosen Art check out the award below and the awards page with the new Site of the Month I also have three new affiliates, and one new piece of fanart which you can see further down in this post. take a look at the amazing new affiliates below:

( post a comment on any blog post or use the contact form here to become an affiliate )

I have been a huge fan of Chosen Art since I got into the fanart biz, and Dana has been a real inspiration over the years, she has this amazing talent for creating fictional scenes, especially with her work with SMG and Dean Winchester, I have seen over time her skill develop and with each new piece get get even more jealous of that skill.

I don’t have much else for an update as I have been really busy with my paid work (well avoiding my paid work when I get home so I feel bad if I do fun work) but I did manage to add one new piece of art work, one piece I have wanted to do for a while now, I have finally finished watching Supernatural up to the end of season 5 and I love it, to my soul lol, but I have never seen any fanart on Bobby Singer, and I thought his character was totally amazing in the show, so I’ve created my own, and I’m really happy with it, I wanted to work mainly with stock photography as you see a lot of that kind of art now, and I wanted to pull away from the type of artwork that I am probably most know for (over kill with the Gradient maps lol I know I know its just so easy to use gradient maps to give it a feel) but I tried something new and I think it came out alright.

New Affiliates at Elucidation Art

Dee — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 17:23:35 +0000

A quicky update today, I have some wonderful new affiliates that you need to checkout, and some brand new fanart as well. I wanted to post these affiliates earlier but I didn’t have enough to put into one post so here goes you can view the affiliates here or you can go and see all my affiliates on this page.

The brand new fanart; Well I think I might be going over board on the supernatural, but my fear is that I’ll watch up the latest episode and I wont have made any, so you will probably see a lost more fanart in the coming weeks regarding supernatural. but I’ve thrown in a new twilight piece just to mix things up a little bit though.

Still Building Up Elucidation

Dee — Mon, 31 May 2010 15:44:45 +0000

So its the month of June, and Elucidation has been up a month, and yes I’m still here lol. I have four new pieces of art work that I’ve added to the site. I think I’m getting back into the swing of things, slowly but surly. I’ve also added a few new pages to Elucidation. I’ve added a page for people to get hosted here, I will only accept Fanart Sites! just to let you guys know. I have also added site of the month again aka Visions. and this month its Black Lagoon. I know I’m one day early but its work tomorrow and I wont be able to do this until I get home and I’ve been itching to post something all week but I didn’t have enough art work or enough pages.

Reason: I’ve always been a major fan of Wenj at Black Lagoon, she has an uncanny way of painting a picture to emphasis the emotion of any piece of artwork. But I think the main reason I am giving her the award as my very first Site of the Month… read more

Latest Additions to the Gallery

Elucidation has a new face

Dee — Sat, 22 May 2010 17:03:44 +0000

Well, I finally did it! I finally added a new layout to elucidation art, there was a lot more to do than I first thought, not to mention the fact I had to do it twice with the gallery being built in a different program lol, but I finally did it. There maybe a few kinks I need to iron out, I’ve been doing this layout for a few months in my spare time, little bits here and there.

Along with the new design I have a few new wallpapers 5 Twilight Wallpapers and 1 True Blood Wallpaper

So what’s new?

Main Page

Well there are quite a few new things, probably most importantly the layout! Image of Eliza came from Immortal Memories Gallery, fantastic high quality images there. With this layout I have tried to emphasis the content, as I want to be able to put some really good relevant content, so you might have to bare with me for a while as I’m rubbish at writing stuff up.

In the side bar you will now see latest editions, which are taken directly from my gallery, so no need to for updating the site it all happens instantly, which means I’ll do block posts on new additions but newest stuff will probably appear in the side bar first.

Probably most important to you guys or you guys with website is the random affiliates section, which will have a cropped image of my affiliates website/art depending on when I make the image with a link to their site, there are two, one with all my affiliates and one with my dailies, people who I am getting really good traffic from or people I just LOVE so much I need to spread the word so if you see the same link well check it out because its bound to be amazing!

In the footer I have a poll which will change from time to time, and I also have top posters, which will list the top ten posters so the more posts the higher up the list you are, and I’m doing a test a the moment, to make sure I don’t get spam but I may but links up to other peoples sites but it depends.

I’ve just noticed something I’ve missed so it will be going up shortly, an RSS feed to my posts so people can instantly get updates.

Pages

I’ve re-written all the pages, so things have changed, you can get to the pages by hovering over the top menu and wait a few seconds for the drop down menu.

Affiliates have changed, I’ve been through all my old affiliates and seen who is missing and who hasn’t linked back, or people on hiatus, if I’ve taken down your link and not emailed you to ask if you want to be affiliates again, it probably means that I couldn’t find your site, but I would love to be affiliates again please just use the contact form or post a message on the blog either way I really want to have all my affiliates back. Alternatively if you had a site and you have lost your hosting, I am willing to host people who I have been affiliates with in the past, if I haven’t previously been affiliates with you but you have a site that you are wanting to move please use the contact form to email me with a link to you site and, I’ll have a look. I don’t know right now how much I’m going to give out, but I’m thinking 1gig space and 5 mysql to each hostee, but if you want your own domain name you will have to buy it yourself and I can set it up.

Things to be added

The RSS feed needs to go up.

I’m going to begin doing the site of the month awards Visions again

Just a LittleNote

If you are using IE 6 or 7 get a better browser, I have deliberately not coded for those browsers in a stand against standards, my site might not meet ALL standards but its got the basics and if you want to use an old browser view old sites, ie6 and ie7 should be banned!

Design Decisions

Dee — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:57:39 +0000

Oh man, I’ve had last week off work and I worked really hard on a new layout for elucidation art, but you know what!!! I don’t like it now. it took me ages to decided on a design idea I was going to go with a cross over of True Blood and Ats because lets face it True Blood has lots of BtVS and AtS links, biggest one being gorgeous blonde human, and gorgeous brunette vampire so I took those two from each of the shows, Sookie and Angel, they make a really nice couple. But I’m not sure on the design, I think the only way to go is to create a new one and just create the Sookie and Angel background I was using as a wallpaper for the gallery.

Don’t you just hate it when you work so long on something you really like and then you look at it too long you begin to not like it even before you’ve finished the damn thing lol.

Also Special thanks to Dana for the Halloween pic

I’ve added a few items to the gallery you can get to them here via the thumbnails
One True Blood text, and one Angel True Blood Cross over

Browser Combatibility AKA I HATE IE 6

Dee — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 15:34:24 +0000

the bane of many designers life the fact that a large percent of people are still using outdated software to browse the internet such as ie6. In fact the majority of the people browsing my site use IE6 I use a stats program to keep in touch with what people are viewing on my site so I can at some point put that to good use and do something with my site that will help people view elucidation-art with more ease.

Internet Explorer 6 5255
Internet Explorer 7 2658
Firefox 3 2468
Firefox 2 955
Opera 297
Safari 275
Firefox 259
Internet Explorer 5 253
Internet Explorer 8 197
and more….

just a peek at some of my stats, so why are so many people still using IE6? and WHY do so many people hate other people using them?

I can’t really answer the first question, that can only really be answered by people who use it. The second one… and as there are so many people using ie6 who view my site let me give you some insight (this may be biased), as with most programs Microsoft likes to be different, ie6 uses a different rendering agent to display websites, which means you can code something in firefox or opera even ie8 it looks great, exactly how it is meant to look, however when you come to view it in ie6 BAM everything is dis aligned, backgrounds aren’t where they are meant to be, ie6 doesn’t even comply to web standard validation rules so even if you code a website with perfect validation, css, and html everything could be perfect but when opening it in ie6 you have no guarantee it will look right.

Some solutions is to write the site twice, once for validation and another with ie6 hacks. which can be a total pain in the backside or the other option is to force people into updating their browsers before they can view your site… See I like this idea, firstly it brings people up to date, and it also stops people from viewing your site which means they are missing out on something although the argument behind that is that people don’t miss what they don’t know so if you stop being from viewing your sites what will they care!

if there is anyone out there that wants to share they reasons for using IE6 I would love to hear about it, like I said the majority of people who view this site use ie6? I realize that some people have copies of windows and don’t want to update their browsers, but that is what things like Firefox are fore you don’t need to update your Internet exploder, you can just use a completely different programme altogether, Firefox is an amazing browsers, along with Google chrome, and opera, they aren’t massively blotted with add-ons.

so can anyone contribute?

oh and PS I now have a twitter page if anyone wants to join me I’ll follow you back @DeeClinch

Learning More on SEO

Dee — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:14:33 +0000

I know I said I would update more frequently, I’ve just started work on a new site for my mum which will hold me back from updating here, but its using the same system as what I use here so anything i find out for them i can implement it here, so its a great way of researching elucidation art, although I do already have a long list of things I want to add here anyway. I have also decided to buy a new domain name for my portfolio site, as I already have twilight-fuse.com with my partner in crime Keeper I am going to devise a whole fuse network. but I wont be getting rid of elucidation. I would love to just be able to buy elucidation.com or elucidation.co.uk. but its not that easy.

I’ve also been looking into SEO, (Search engine optimization) I know hardly anything about it. does anyone know any good sites, and good tips about SEO I would love to hear them and anything I find out I will share here. although SEO sounds so boring lol not as good as doing fanart, but to get fanart viewed kinda need to know SEO. and I do love working on layouts and I didn’t realize how much the way you code your site effects how search engines view your site. so be warned if you are like me and know nothing about SEO do a search and find out if anything you are doing is preventing you from being searched properly. I’ve found a few things, which is one of the things I’m going to be changing along the way with Elucidation.

so please comment I would love to hear about any tips and tricks you might have. thanks