A couple major graphic overhauls you've probably noticed in the passed 24 hours. The big changes came in the form of a
new banner and
home button at the top of all my pages. Below are the graphics I am referring to...
I custom created the banner using
Adobe Photoshop CS and a variety of my pictures. The wolf backgrounds were taken from a public domain site and knocked down in opacity as to not distract the eye too much, but be visible enough to let you know they're there. These were added to the banner late in its creation to go along with the new HAM radio callsign (KW0LFF) I will be getting on August 2nd. Those who know me well enough also know I am obsessed with wolves as they're my favorite animal! Between the wolves, another transparent image, this one is my 'WX NERD' license plate. All three transparent images were changed over to a gray-scale format to allow for better transparencies. The main background is a series of lightning shots taken with my digital camera. In all, four different shots were used and combined using the Rubber Stamp tool and a Blur tool to rid of the hard lines where the light didn't comletely fade away to black. The two images of me were taken by Scott Eubanks and
Jon Van de Grift. I used the Extract tool to pull me from the images and then used the History Brush tool and Eraser to smooth out the edges. I then used a black to transparent gradient on both to add effect. The lettering was a Bank Gothic font which I typed out in Photoshop. I used a variety of layer blending techniques to aquire the lettering effects. For the italicized lettering, I had to skew the layer for my desired look.
The recreation of my Yin & Yang tornado icon was difficult to achieve and was also done with
Adobe Photoshop CS. Since my first Yin & Yang/Tornado logo was done years ago, I had forgotten and couldn't recreate the previous look. With that issue at hand, I elected to create a new icon to match the main banner. Starting with a Wingdings font, I created a Yin & Yang and flipped it upwards. I then created a pair of sides using two of my lightning shots; one with an orange color, the other more purple/blue. I centered the bolts in the Yin & Yang sections and rubber stamped some areas to keep consistant color. The tornado was googled up and I found it on a site that no longer exists.
Here is a direct link to the image I used; no photo information was stated, thus the image goes uncredited. If someone knows who shot this, please let me know so I can credit them. Obviously no tornado I have shot had the look I needed, and this was the closest I could find. I did some rubber stamping to get the shape and curve I needed to fill in the center of the Yin & Yang. This was done after I did a horizontal flip of the image. Another free use wolf image was used as the background transparency. The lettering was done the same as the banner in the same font. All graphic layers contained various layer blending techniques.
I've had a few questions in regards to the idea of the Yin & Yang tornado. Back in high school, I doodled several designs for what I wanted my "life logo" to be. At the time, I was a big storm nerd (no change, huh) and an avid learner of the Martial Arts, Tae Kwon Do in particular. Since they were my two main areas of interest then, I figured a way to combine the two into one using the Martial Arts symbol of the Yin & Yang and weaving a tornado through the middle of it. Thus lead to the creation of the logo, as well as the name, "Tornadoes Kick" (
a name for a Tae Kwon Do kick). I officially dubbed my chasing efforts "Tornadoes Kick Storm Chasing" in 1997 after the successful first chase of the
Clarksburg, Ohio Tornado in May of 1997 and have stuck with it ever since.
