Blog with the Bear

I love me the Gimp.

I've been working on this blog for weeks now.  Not the content - who cares about that - but making it pretty.  Alas, I know very little code and I'm teaching myself graphic design.  So it's kind of a fruitless endeavor.

Well, not fruitless.  Here we have fruit, right here on your screen.  But it's hard!  My poor dragon Harvey only looks nice in Mozilla (if you're using IE, yes, I know he's got a chunk cut out of him).  I have learned a lot, and the most important thing is: free stuff doesn't work too well sometimes.

I mean things like Blogger - which is cool, don't get me wrong, see below - and web design software.  And made for TV movies.  Free, but not as satisfying as some epic big-screen blowout.

I'm not willing to pay money for a blog design software, but I have all these big plans to make pretty things!  It's very frustrating.  I've tried several freeware programs, and nope, they just don't cut the taco.  So, I am trying my best to do something fabulous with Blogger's free templates.  Unfortunately, my very limited experience with code makes this a challenge.  Hence, Harvey's splinching.  Poor dragon.

However..I do love me the Gimp.

Gimp is an open source software like Photoshop.  As mentioned above, I really am not willing to spend actual dinero on fancy software.  I need to buy food first.  But the Gimp is free.  And it's a lot of fun.  For over a year now I've been tinkering with it, and I've progressed from drawing little lines with the pencil on a blank file to understanding transparency, using multiple layers, and scripts.  Okay, so I have not mastered these things...but I understand them.

And brushes!  I love brushes!  Whoever came up with that idea is just golden.  See my cute little icons for my stories in the upper right?  All brushes.

And thus ends another post, because I need more to figure out this cloud thingy.  Why isn't it showing? And why doesn't this post have a title like the first one did? Sigh.