i did some writing, different ways of writing the site title.

I was thinking of doing a nice pen and ink style design for the site.

try and make something that can be simple and striking.

I might get a nice brush to use with my ink.

not sure, I'll see what i can come up with.

anyhow... which piece of writing is your favourite? you can pick different bits from differnt writings if you like.

i can redo this as many times as is necessary and also i can cut and attach in photoshop.

chances are, I could end up tracing around any of these shapes using the pen tool and make a really crisp black and white image.

I like the one in the middle, four down. I think t looks the neatest and fanciest.

Well, if you refine the one on the top right a bit, I think that one wonld look great.

i like the one at the way Left under.

that looks good. =D

wow, so there are 3 choices. well all of them are around teh same basic principle.

I will look at all 3 and refine that.

so what do ya think of this ?

I did it aligned to a grid, so i had to unwarp the original text to fit a square grid and then i warped it again afterwards, here is teh blocked version.

some results from a couple of days of inspiration settig in.

small amendment -

What's that squiggly thing supposed to be? It sort of looks like an abstract rendering of the Control Medal...

It sort of looks like an abstract rendering of the Control Medal...

that's interesting!

do you like it?

by the way, you are wrong. it is not a control metal.

i am planning on making this more of an ink and brush style. i am not sure how i'll achieve it, perhaps by printing it out lightly and writing over it...

I hope that when i have finished working with this it can be a new front page and the logo is pretty simple in nature so it can be incorporated throughout the site.

Well I was going to say jellyfish, or maybe Cthulhu, but then I remembered that niether of them had anything to do with this site.

I like how it's coming out so far. I have to agree with Kenji that at first I also thought it was a different and abstract way to do a CM but after you explained it I can understand it more.

Nice job man.

ok well this is what i class as proper art. I do that stuff now and then.

the way proper art works is that it comes from a special little place in my head that does the imagining of odd things and doesn't always fully explain to me what it is doing. it is the rare occasion when i don't think about it logically.

so when looking at it and guessing what it is, I am as much in hte dark as you are!

but the fact of the matter is, this design is heavily influenced by the subject matter of this site.

when i look at it, I can imagine a number of things going on.

the first thing i thought of was like yourself kenji-chan. the control metal. then after i looked at it more, i pictured it as a wheel leaving smoke and skid marks, reminding me of the wheel mecha thing from go-onger. then I imagined it as a kamen rider style logo on it's side. the two sections look like kamen rider faiz's eyes. also, it can look like a belt buckle in some ways. you could say it looks like a monsters eye.

It does have kind of an eyeball-ish look to it, but it also looks a lot like Valkyria's Control Medal. I suppose it might look like a wheel, but those tendril-things make it look more like part of a Guyver.

I like the font we have been using. BBdude really made a good choice with that font.

i decided to forget about that handwriting style... i just couldn't get it to look special.

so i placed the decent font with the image design and played about with colour and texture.

I am really liking what i came up with. it's just the edges that needs work. too perfect.

That looks really cool, Ryuki. I like the marker-y look to the picture. Nice text, too.

That's really nice I thought the design was an organic spaceship of some kind, you know upgraded Uranus ships, lol.

ok guys, what i have done now is that i printed it out faintly and used it to dreate outlines. I experimented a couple of diffrent techniques.

i tried using a brush pen, I used a black marker, I tried using my ink and pen.

I thik that the original intention when i started on this journey was a pretty erratic ink and pen style, something that loooked really energetic.

so when i started using teh ink and pen, I forgot to siphon off the excess from the nib the first time i dipped it in hte ink. it made a big splodge on hte page!! I thought.. oh well nowe i made a mess, but i remembered my original intention so i bent down and blowed on hte page. now a couple minutes later and with a very light head from blowing so much... I had a interesting messy drawing ..!!

so i have nhow scanned it in and addd it to hte design.

I am unsure which is better. the clean version or this ultra messy version.

here is the messy version anyhow.

The clean version has my vote.

ok, I added a mask to reduce the amount of messy ink and i placed it within a page.

http://www.japan-legend.com/testpage/index4.htm

if you still prefer the clean version, I will prepare a page with the clean version for people to have a look at.

ok, I added a mask to reduce the amount of messy ink and i placed it within a page.

http://www.japan-legend.com/testpage/index4.htm

if you still prefer the clean version, I will prepare a page with the clean version for people to have a look at.

I still think the clean is better, the ink trails from the tenrils at the back are not bad, but at the front, it kind of looks too untidy.

ok, I painted over parts of the front ink splotches.

is this what you were referring to, or was it more than that?

http://www.japan-legend.com/testpage/index4.htm ( you might have to refresh the page)

To be honest, I really prefer the clean one myself.

Yeah, definitely the clean one. It just looks so much sharper.

In that case here are both modes for your perusal.

http://www.japan-legend.com/testpage/index4.htm

http://www.japan-legend.com/testpage/index5.htm

i also prefer the clean version.