Art Raffle Time + Mastertracks Title Music

Hey Jammers! It's that time– the day of my Jam-iversarry :D

10 years. Wow.

During the first couple years, I don't think I would have guessed that I'd be playing AJ for this long, but at the same time, I could never imagine quitting. 

I remember around 2014, or maybe 2013, I made a big emo post on here about going on hiatus from AJ indefinitely... only to come back like 2 days later xD

Whether I like it or not, the world of Jamaa holds a big piece of my heart, and so, so many memories that have shaped me into the person I am today. It can make me feel self-conscious to admit that, yeah, but I know a big bunch of you feel the same, so I know I'm not alone <3

That being said, I do deal with a lot of overwhelm, so I'll admit that sometimes the thought of writing posts here on top of all my other different projects can get, well... overwhelming. 

But I'm okay with that. While I have a ton of different interests that pull me in a ton of different directions, this one right here is an interest that's helped me through some truly difficult times. And it's really all thanks to you :')

Thank you for reading Animal Jam Stream, and thank you for being a part of this great little corner of the AJ community! 

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To celebrate this milestone, I was thinking something low-key but still nice. 

So how 'bout an art raffle?

If you'd like to enter, comment down below by Feb 28th...:

•    your username – either AJC, AJPW, or both if you want

       •    what you'd like in a drawing – could be your character, could be anything! I'm usually better at drawing humanoid characters, but I'm happy to draw nonhumans as well. (Appropriate for all ages, of course)

•    how you'd like to get your art if you win – I could post it on this blog for you, or give it to you as an AJC Masterpiece (I got no tokens on AJPW, sorry!)  

...and the winner will be picked randomly on March 1st!

I hope this is something y'all will be interested in :>

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Before I go, here's one last thingy:

I like the AJPW Mastertracks title music, so I saved it for anyone else who also likes it :>

That is all.

See you in Jamaa!

Layout Testing Part 2 – A Transparent Teacup

Hey Jammers! It's February again– month of the Lunar New Year, the Friendship Festival on AJ, and the month that will mark another year since I first set paw in the world of Jamaa. (AAA I know that wording sounds cheesy– but ya know what, I'm gonna leave it in there. Because it's happy)

Ideally, I'd host some kind of a contest or raffle for the 17th, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to get around to that, mostly because I don't have many interesting items to give away. Hmm...

Would any of you be interested in a contest/raffle that didn't involve item prizes? I could draw something for whoever ends up being the winners– perhaps an OC, the winner's animal, or something like a custom Masterpiece? I'm sure I still got some MP tokens lying around here... 

Let me know in the comments what kind of thing you might be interested in this month! C:

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Redesigning my blog has been a fun and relaxing process for me, but I know the next part of this post where I talk about it might be a bit boring to you. Nonetheless, some content is better than no content, so here it is:

That slightly blurry green-ish block thing on my layout test blog is my new coding victory– I've figured out how to put an image behind each post's date header. That green thing is a test image!

I'm not sure where the idea came from, but I was thinking that each post should have a lil teacup on top of it.

And after searching Jamaa, I found the perfect teacup:

This one.

What's also good about it is that it's naturally pixelated, so it was much easier to erase its background.

One issue, though:

Ignoring the positioning (which I know how to fix) the teacup at its normal size looks just blurry enough on the test blog to annoy the perfectionist part of me.

Something I've learned is that it's good to create your drawings/graphics at a size at least 2x bigger than how you want to display them. That helps minimize the fuzziness. 

So I opened the original screenshot in GIMP, zoomed in 4x:

(Somehow, increasing the actual size of the image in GIMP made it blurry, but zooming in on it didn't..)

After going ahead and covering the overlapping machine part with a hard pixel brush, I used GIMP's convenient color-select tool to erase the rest of the background.

Then I filled the layer behind it with bright green. Because increasing the actual image size would make it blurry for some reason I don't know yet, I needed to screenshot the zoomed-in teacup and then erase the green.

Ta-da~

When I get around to it, I'll find a way to add this to my test layout in a way that looks cute. 

EDIT: Just realized it still has some white spaces around it, dang. Back to work, I guess...

Aaaaaand that's all the rambling for now! See you in Jamaa ^^