When Conrad was worrying about how he would beautify the site with artwork, he ended up being pleasantly surprised. One of his own staff members from ZHQ stopped hiding her drawing abilities and began flooding Conrad's E-Mail inbox with pencil sketches. Jenny Davis was a fairly active staff member of ZHQ, but she didn't get recognized very much by most of the visitors. That will change with HYLIA.Com! In addition to writings of homicidal tendancies where she most often signs her letters as "Chibi-Zel", Jenny Davis is now a contributing artist.
She creates her drawings with colored pencil and scans them in. At this time, her drawings look like they were created with pencil which, especially when pixelated through the scanning process, just don't have quite the right "look and feel" of web art which is often more cartoony and has less numbers of variations of color intensity.
Although Conrad lacks the drawing capabilities of Jenn, sometimes he can perform what seems like magic using software. Combining Conrad's expertese, a number of software tools, and plenty of patience through a process involving some trial and error, Conrad then turns Chibi-Zel's drawings into a more web-friendly format which looks more anime-ish. He also usually is able to get a smaller filesize. The results are often just as much of a surprise for Chibi-Zel as anyone else since she often doesn't see just how good her artwork is able to turn out in its final stages until it's posted on the site.
Here are some examples of the artwork Chibi-Zel produces, and how it looks when it goes onto the site:
| Original J.D. Art | Web-Ready Postable Graphic | ||||
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| Usually it takes multiple steps to get the final product. The following show just two of the different steps applied to one image. | |||||
| FileSize: 260,400 | Filesize: 141,025 | 178,862 | |||
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More examples of J.D.'s artwork, as well as artwork by other artists, will be added later.
Ron Fuller first introduced himself to Conrad towards the end of Conrad's reign over ZHQ as webmaster, and so he just simply wasn't around long enough to become recognized as a staff member. Such unofficial status didn't last long when Conrad started gathering individuals to form the beginnings of the HYLIA.Com staff.
Ron Fuller is a recognizable name meaning "quality pictures". His pictures reflect high standards... very high standards. Such high standards that he himself is often quite picky about his own work. We, the lowly masses, however, seem to be most often impressed with every bit of his work that he graces us with, and it is quite an honor to have him on board as a staff member of HYLIA.Com. These pictures do take time, and so he may not make pictures as fast as many other people can make pictures, but, then again, his pictures are pretty awesome when they do come.
The following is just one of the pictures that Ron has shared with the HYLIA.Com staff over the past months. He titled it, Golden Land. It may be a bit big and so take a while to download for some people, but I'd rather not shrink it and make it lose *any* of the quality of Ron's products.
Stay tuned to HYLIA.Com, as we definitely plan to be posting more of Ron's greatness.