Art for Popcorn!

Hiya Jammers! I hope you're all doing well today. My laptop's losing charge, so this will just be a short post to upload the art of Popcornpizza25's AJ red panda that they won in the raffle!

I hope ya like it :>

If you're Popcorn, this art is just for you to use as you wish!

Whew... this drawing is such a huge first for me. I get so nervous about drawing animals, especially if they're sort of stylized, so I rarely end up with complete-feeling artworks of them. Animals are just so cool and I feel like I can't really capture that coolness in a drawing xD

But I tried, and I think I'm pretty happy with how this turned out! I aimed for a mix between how red pandas look on AJ and how they look in real life.

Also, aside from the initial sketch, this is also the first full drawing I've done on GIMP! I've honestly been having an easier time drawing with GIMP than I ever had with Photoshop. 

Something I learned about how to create line weight with digital art is to use an oval shaped brush instead of a circular one! I recommend you try it, if you want. 

This is also the first drawing that I made a special signature for :3

Well, that's all I got for now. I have some ideas for a couple posts, so I hope I'll be able to get to writing them after my school work is done. I have so many hours to do.... AAAAAA

See you in Jamaa!

Art Raffle Winner~

Hey Jammers! Happy March to you all. I hope we can make this a good month ^^

As promised, today I'll be announcing the winner of this past month's small art raffle. Big thanks to everyone who entered, and don't worry if you didn't find the time to enter– I'll be doing more of these in the not-so-distant future =)

Thought it might be fun to announce it through a little video! 

I assigned each person who entered a number from 1 to 4, and used a random number generator to find the winner.

So without further ado, the winner is...

(Click full-screen! Also, for some reason it's weirdly blurry until the halfway point, but it's not that way on the actual YouTube page :| )

Psst, don't keep scrolling! You can find the raffle winner at the end of the short vid above!

But if you can't play the video or don't feel like watching, then I'll let you know here that the winner is...

Popcornpizza25!

Congrats, Popcorn! I'll be drawing your AJ character like you requested, and I'll post it once I'm done :D

(It would be the same white and yellow red panda that's in your blog banner, right? Let me know when you can so I can be sure!)

Gonna try to go all out with this one, so I can't promise when it'll be done ^^; but I'm gonna shoot for March 16th at the latest! It'll be digital art btw c:

Well, that's all I got for now. I'm gonna go do some drawing homework, and after that I'll start planning the drawing ASAP!

See you in Jamaa~

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! 

–––

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 :>

–––

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:

–––

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 ^^

Layout Testing :)

Hey Jammers!

These past couple days, I've been making a lot of progress with my longterm goal of redesigning my blog layout. I guess I got a little burst of motivation when I learned that a lot of the older Blogger tutorials I've been finding actually can still work in 2022!

Here's a screenshot of what I've got done so far on my layout test blog:

A few of you may know that I actually finished that header in late 2019, but... never did... anything... with it. 0-0

While the header may have been the biggest part of the redesign– what with drawing the panda, positioning the background, adding glows/shadows, and don't get me started on the fonts– it was the page tabs that made me the most nervous. 

It's just hard customizing page tabs with Blogger. In the past I had tried using an image map (an image with multiple links), but the code stopped working after a while and many people told me that not all the page links worked.

But recently I've found a bunch of tutorials that did work!!! And now, after much trial and error, I think I'm pretty much happy with how the page tabs look. At least on my layout test blog.

While I haven't begun layout designing below the page tabs yet, I think the hardest part is finally out of the way. Hopefully...

> Here's the link to my layout test blog < if you ever feel like checking in on my progress!

I can't promise I'll be completely done anytime soon, but this project has started becoming more fun than annoying, so who knows?

See you in Jamaa!