Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Once again, I've found something amazing in the most unlikely place.

I BOUGHT AT WAR WITH THE MYSTICS BY THE FLAMING LIPS.

AT SEMBAWANG.

AT JUNCTION 8.

WTF?!?!?! SRSLY??!!?!!

You didn't get me wrong. Sembawang in Junction 8.

I thought I'd have to head down to HMV or whatever to find it.

Turns out they do have it in SEMBAWANG.

However it's the only Flaming Lips album in the entire neighbourhood - the next copy and the rest of their 25-year discography would probably be somewhere in HMV. Or Gramaphone. You get the deal.

And as I was uploading it to iTunes, I found a very massive problem - well it'd be massive if you're a visual person like me - I CAN'T MODIFY ALBUM ART! The same problem also occurred with Mika's Life in Cartoon Motion. And having reached my trivial-matters' boiling point, I Googled and found the solution. The problem? The WAV format. I converted it to MP3 format, voila! Now I can have the two prettiest album art in my iTunes and iPod! YIPPEE! (c'mon, Wayne Coyne is an awesome artist, it'd be such a waste if I can't have his artwork in my iPod!)

And this skin was hence created to celebrate this wonderful incident. However the Flaming Lips kinda... overrided my previous decision to make a blogskin dedicated to Mika. I promise, the next time round we'll get Mika, okay?

Let's see.

My first blogskin over at the Old Blog was for Project Runway. Austin Scarlett in particular. It was a gift from my best friend. The HTML code is currently in the old computer.

My first self-made blogskin was dedicated to Andrea McArdle. In my opinion, she was the most brilliant child star in Broadway - I heard her sing Tomorrow from Annie and was instantly mesmerised by the power of her voice, and mind you, she wasn't even 12 then. At this point I've had the first blogskin for ages and the Project Runway fever was also wearing off. So yes, I bravely asked for help from the same best friend and Kristy and there you go, a Broadway-themed blogskin.

The second is by far the most disastrous, and I should be glad if nobody has any memory of it. It was so gross I don't even know where to begin. Colour scheme maybe. PINK. Header maybe. THE SIMS 2 FREEZER BUNNY. Okay the Freezer Bunny is cute. Except the blogskin isn't. What was it for? Valentine's Day of course. No, it didn't help me score dates.

The third was one of the cutest. The picture I used was a production sketch of Dory the Blue Tang from Finding Nemo. Look, I know how much people hate the movie, but you've gotta admit the animation was awesome. Plus I like Dory and Squirt. So armed with that picture I went on to create the first blogskin with those clickabomb-thingofabombs whereby you click a button and it takes you to different sections of the blog. Oh and first time I used a jazz-inspired song to go with - Beyond the Sea by Robbie Williams. This skin, I had Clarice's blogskin for reference so it wasn't tough at all.

At this point I can't remember everything but there are some highlights of course. For instance, the first time I used an LP song. I think it was Session. I didn't do it justice at all 'cause the graffiti effect was like shit and I haven't properly mastered Photoshop. There are some which I really loved. The Corpse Bride-inspired one was one of my best Photoshop attempts. I discovered brushes, channel mixing and alternative fonts. And I discovered Michael Buble. So naturally, I paired Victor and Victoria with Michael Buble's duet with Laura Pausini, You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine.

Andrew Wyeth's Albert's Son paired with Fort Minor's Where'd You Go taught me to appreciate two things - simplicity and overall mood. Do you know I almost cried the first time I browsed through the blogskin with the music playing. I guess that meant I captured the melancholy well enough.

The previous blogskin which doesn't have any dedication in particular was a first in almost a year of skinning hiatus, due to O-levels and the lack of proper tools. O-levels was over; I got Photoshop in the system with much help from Weijie; I managed to revert to Classic Template with the help of, once again, Weijie; the first blogskin for this current URL was fugly enough; do I need any more reasons why I should revamp this baby? So I did. What came out was pretty simple but pretty pretty. And pretty sad-looking too, even though I didn't really intend to make it all sad and depressed-looking. But since it already looked so sad and depressing, I decided to use an equally sad and depressing track - My December by Linkin Park.