I’m almost ready to go live with the site. Right now I’m trying to create a custom Drupal theme from this site’s design. Once that’s finished, then we’ll be in business.
The image below was created by converting two bitmap graphics, the book cover and a painter’s easel, into one combined image using SVG–Scalable Vector Graphics.
Though the book cover image was large enough for my intended use, the easel wasn’t and using SVG allows us to resize images beyond the original and without pixelation. The combined image was sized to what you see here, and then re-converted back into a bitmap graphic, in this case a PNG.
I used Vector Magic to convert the bitmap images to SVG and Inkscape to convert back to the bitmap. Inkscape also has a bitmap trace function to convert from bitmap to vector (SVG), but I’ve not found it to be as good as Vector Magic for my purposes.
I received my inspiration for the drop shadowed clip art used in all of my sites from the old English/Victorian toy theaters. These wonderful creations featured static backdrops painted like a theater set, with characters that could be clipped or cut out from a book, pasted to a stick and then used to re-create a specific play. Ironically enough, toy theaters lost their popularity with the advent of television, itself endangered by the increasing use of the web to deliver video content. What goes around, comes around.
All is not lost for toy theater, though. Released last year and with a planned US release of this summer, a new movie adaption of Dante’s Inferno was created with modern theme and as toy theater. If your computer can swing it, select the HD trailer. Note that this trailer does have a mature theme.
For the more ambitious, a laptop framed in a toy theater box.
