Why do I even try? · 4:37am Jun 20th, 2014
So, tonight has been a wonderful example of trying hard and failing horribly even when you succeed.
As I had recently published the newest entry of The Itch, I thought now would be a perfect time to upload a new cover art of my own creation that I had been working on for quite some time. Thinking this to be a simple objective, I prepared to delete the current image and upload the new cover art from its google drive file. Deleting the image went just dandy, but it was in the latter part of the goal that I ran into difficulty. Upon successfully uploading (as I so believed) the image to The Itch, I found the page to be bare, unadorned by any form of art. Believing this to be a one-time mistake, I uploaded it again. And again. And again. And again.
Perturbed, I thought that perhaps this wonderful site of ours had an issue with google drive drawing-type files. I tried to upload a file of the same drawing I had on the computer. And tried again. And again. And again.
Then I noticed the little line of text lying below the "Upload Image" button, that read:
Max filesize of 1mb
Looking at the file's info, I noticed it was 8.2mb, a whopping 7.2mb over the maximum size that could be uploaded.
Stewing on the inside, I then set off on an epic quest to reduce the image to an appropriate size. Eventually, with the help of my trusty squire, MS Paint, I completed the Herculean task, uploaded the image, went to The Itch's page...
...And saw it looked like absolute shit.
It wasn't that the image quality was bad, no, it was how the image looked as a tiny square in the middle of my screen. When drawing the cover art, I hadn't taken into consideration the dynamics of the screen, and am now paying for it at 11:30 tonight. Some parts of the drawing were too small to be discernible, and because of it, the whole thing looked horrible. With a weary mind, I put back the original image, and asked myself:
Hell if I know. Here's the full-size image for those of you who are curious at what my most recent failure looks like: Clickedy-Click
Maybe I'll make a better one sometime, once I've built up some motivation. All I'm thinking right now is:
Fuck this, I'm going to sleep.
Goodnight and pleasant dreams,
The Fuck-this-shit Cousin
Tada:
i58.tinypic.com/2h38leh.jpg
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Wait, what the fuck? Tinypic down sampled the fuck out of it. Here's a Dropbox.
Here's my attempt at improving the pic.
i1153.photobucket.com/albums/p502/xTSGx/THEITCHCOVERARTtest_zps9262ec65.jpg
I dropped the white border and elongated it to fit a more "movie poster" size, which always looks better on Fimfiction than square pics. Here's what it looks like when uploaded onto Fimfiction (I changed the cover image right back to the original after taking the screencap).
i1153.photobucket.com/albums/p502/xTSGx/kmfewfweo_zpsd96a8ba5.png
The only downside is that I just copypasted a section of the squiggly background to fill in the elongated sections and I think it's pretty obvious it's copypasted, so if you use it, you might want to touch up the top and bottom to make it less noticeable.
I wouldn't worry too much how it looks in the lists. All cover images are tiny on there so there's no real way to improve something that's smaller than a thumbnail. What's important is if it looks good once you click on the story and I think this one definitely does.
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This was certainly unexpected.
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Wow...
I had made this blog post to vent my frustrations before going to bed, but for both of you to go out of your way to actually help me with my problem... You certainly have left me shocked.
Thank you both for this, I certainly never expected anyone to do anything like this. You both have my gratitude, and I'll definitely remember to mention you both in the next entry.
Once again, just for good measure, thank you.
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