Ive been thinking about drawing my own banner but im curious about others i have seen
* would it be easier on the computer or paper?
* do i have to put it through certain filters for use on the forum
* do i make it realistic or cartoonish
Id love to see other drawn banners to see how they look on profiles and to give myself an idea about how i am going to accomplish this
Thanks
War hawk
Preußenhawk

What exactly do you mean by drawn?

Like an entirely original piece of artwork as the basis of the banner?

Or more like my banners?



What I do for the warbird paintings is find them online, then I add text and emblems and such and make it into a banner using Paint.NET. For my bottom one, I just made a noise background in grey and then added everything to that. My animation banner with the tank shooting down the SE5a was a little more complicated but I can let you know what goes into that if you need.

Don't know if thats the stuff you were looking for, but hope that helps. If you wanted to draw one from scratch, you can probably use paint.NET for that as well, though I got my start with the MS Paint tool. lol

I mean actually drawing them by scratch but thank you for the advice!

Yep, figured that might have been it. Well, I've done a little drawing with a computer before, but I don't know that I can really speak for good techniques. However, I do think paint.NET is a good option for this, it has lots of good tools to use. Another option is GiMP, which I havent used before. Both of which are free, which is nice since photoshop or a professional drawing program costs a ton.


Paint.NET takes a little while to get used to, but it's very powerful once you get the hang of it.


One technical advise bit I can give, is that when you are trying to do something precise, make sure to zoom in to maybe 600-1200%, which is what I do. If you look very closely at my banner below with the brown plane flying over the town with a train, you may be able to notice that the back of the plane has been edited. It used to have symbols like the other planes. What I do with that kind of stuff is zoom in really far and try to copy/paste in places or color match and camouflage so it looks like it's meant to be there.

i ran your banner in a filter in photo shop just to show you the filters can be combined this one is pastel oil painting

Dognamitt wrote: i ran your banner in a filter in photo shop just to show you the filters can be combined this one is pastel oil painting

Thats neato dog!!!!!! The filter looks similar to the ones G.I. Used on some of their banners

One of the problems ive had with drawing on the computer is when i upload it to the forum it says its too big. Is there a website or app that could shrink the size for forum use without the silly watermarks?

yes thats a pre installed one but you can also do it manually

WB|War hawk1-5 wrote:

Dognamitt wrote: i ran your banner in a filter in photo shop just to show you the filters can be combined this one is pastel oil painting

Thats neato dog!!!!!! The filter looks similar to the ones G.I. Used on some of their banners

The best hand drawn original banner I can think of is Pedrinho's...

War hawk, what I do is use postimage (its either postimage.com or .org) and upload the pic there. Thats how most people put images on the forum. There are some other sites too, like Tinypic, and some people might use imgur.

Thank you so much for suggesting postimage it helped a lot!
Well it is done tell me how i did.
I used MangaStudio, Addtext, and postimage

click image upload

Hey... no problem hawk. Your banner looks amazing!

Mom already has a series of hand-drawn banners

My seven-year-old niece did the components for these for moms under aged players

And then there's this one. Which some of it is hand drawn, and some of it's not

It's just a matter of opinion, but I finally online services and filters to look crappy. I just get somebody to draw the separate components that I scanned them, and then Photoshop them all into a banner

GHOSTRIDER1 wrote: Mom already has a series of hand-drawn banners

My seven-year-old niece did the components for these for moms under aged players

And then there's this one. Which some of it is hand drawn, and some of it's not

It's just a matter of opinion, but I finally online services and filters to look crappy. I just get somebody to draw the separate components that I scanned them, and then Photoshop them all into a banner

I had those in mind when i had the idea to do myself one. Your niece is really good!

The trick is to draw everything separately, then scan it, then put it in Photoshop that way you can blend them however you like. And she only drew the crayon ones. I did that on purpose so that they would look childish. She didn't do it all on her own Mrs. ghost helped her

GHOSTRIDER1 wrote: The trick is to draw everything separately, then scan it, then put it in Photoshop that way you can blend them however you like. And she only drew the crayon ones. I did that on purpose so that they would look childish. She didn't do it all on her own Mrs. ghost helped her

Very neat! I will be sure to try drawing on paper too! Could i get the same results through GIMP? I already have that program so it would be much easier than getting a new one.
Speaking of Sputnik's banner.. Is he still playing? I haven't seen him in ages.

I don't know what gimp is. Sputnik dropped back in after a very long absence around about May or June. He was here for about a month or so but I haven't seen him in a while either

I think the best hand drawn one is:


Also Ped's but I was modding it (not quite finished and I don't know where the original is, sorry) so it looked like sundown...

You can make it in GIMP just make sure you are loaded with patience since it only takes me a few minutes and I start swearing at that damn program...if you are used to PS, GIMP is a nightmare..if you are used to GIMP I think it would be fine.

Whiplash wrote: I think the best hand drawn one is:

Also Ped's but I was modding it (not quite finished and I don't know where the original is, sorry) so it looked like sundown...

You can make it in GIMP just make sure you are loaded with patience since it only takes me a few minutes and I start swearing at that damn program...if you are used to PS, GIMP is a nightmare..if you are used to GIMP I think it would be fine.

Heya Whip,

Gotta agree with you on that one. Well done and see you at The Jolly Roger---drinks on me.

The easiest way I've found to do hand drawn stuff is to start by actually hand drawing my outlines & borders, scanning that in, and using my user-friendliest editor to "ink" all those lines. Personally, I use an ancient program called Ulead Photo Express 2.0 as my "simple" program.

Then I go back with Photo Express and Gimp to do color and any special effects. It is a painful program to learn, but once you mess around with Gimp for awhile, you can get a lot of cool effects out of it.
.

yep i mainly use gimp but i got a wacom pad years ago and is great to use in photshop that came free with the pad

S. E. Dailey wrote: The easiest way I've found to do hand drawn stuff is to start by actually hand drawing my outlines & borders, scanning that in, and using my user-friendliest editor to "ink" all those lines. Personally, I use an ancient program called Ulead Photo Express 2.0 as my "simple" program.

Then I go back with Photo Express and Gimp to do color and any special effects. It is a painful program to learn, but once you mess around with Gimp for awhile, you can get a lot of cool effects out of it.
.

Huh. Hand drawn banners are cool! Hand drawn stuff is good because you can make things however you want instead of using premade pictures. I might look into getting a hand drawn Honorable Aces banner.