Extended Backgrounds

Yesterday I spent the day outside power washing the driveway. So today me and my tomato hued skin are taking a break and hiding from the sun, which gives me a chance to play around a bit. A couple of the new-to-us Ascroft pics that have come out in the last several days are just lovely and possibly some of my all-time favorites.

Because I like them so much I want to be able to use them as wallpapers on my laptop. But I’m weird I guess, and pretty much refuse to center the image with just a random solid color behind it, or crop the image so that it fills the screen but cuts off a lot of the original picture. Because of that, I’ve been playing around with trying to figure out how to extend the backgrounds. I thought I would share these in case anyone else would like to use them.

I had trouble with the first one, so the background is stretched out rather funny, but in the end I like how it turned out:

The next one seriously might be my new absolute favorite RA photo ever. Jeans, t-shirt, Converse sneakers and a big, almost goofy smile. Yup, it’s a keeper (and my current wallpaper):

Gotta say thanks to RANet for finding and sharing the HQ version of all of these pics. They make playing with the photos in Photoshop so much more enjoyable.

Ebb and Flow

Ebb and flow seems to be a good description of my life as a fangirl. There are times when I’m exuberant. Times I not only want, but seem to need the shared experience with other fans–the reassurance that although the journey is different for each of us, we’re all in the same boat. Not to mention the joint enthusiasm when new photos, interviews and such are released.  Then there are times that I’m more withdrawn. I still look with pleasure and watch with rapture but the desire to share the experience is low or even non-existent. I simply have nothing to say or contribute to the conversation and all of my enjoyment is this internalized thing and there just aren’t any words.

In case you can’t tell by the lack of posts here of late, I’m feeling rather withdrawn. But I did make a new wallpaper today with the most recent Robert Ascroft photo and I thought I would share:

Hopefully I’ll be back to my more lively, engaged self soon. But it the meantime, I hope y’all enjoy the wallpaper.

First Attempt: Richard Armitage Screensaver

Happy Easter everyone! I hope that if this special day means something for you, that you are enjoying the celebrations.

In the last couple of days I got a spark of inspiration. What was it this time? Well, I thought I would try and figure out how to make my own screensaver. It turns out that this is a multi-step process…at least the method I found. It started out with making an animated gif in Photoshop, which thankfully I already know how to do. Then it was on to converting it to an swf file in Flash (gotta love free 30 day trials). The last step was using a freeware program that converts the flash file into a screensaver. The program was not only free, but also really straightfoward!

So here is the gif I started out with (I had to shrink it for WordPress):

 

Now that I know how to do this, I think I’ll go back and see if I can make something a little more polished. If anyone is interested in a copy of the screensaver, you can download the install file here. I love that once I installed the file, I simply had to go into the personalize option and select this as my screensaver. Believe it or not, I’m all about easy! 😉

Putting RA Photos to Good Use

Real life has been intruding on fangirling of late. Between not feeling so hot towards the end of last week and real life concerns that I won’t bore you with, I just haven’t been feeling all that inspired or creative. Then more pictures from the Ascroft photoshoot were discovered on Monday and they were a big pick me up. I played around with a couple of the photos to make wallpapers for my laptop and thought I would share them as part of FanstRAvaganza.

This one lasted for all of five minutes on my screen before I decided I wanted something different, but I still like it:

The something different I came up with also included the same photo, but combined with another from the photoshoot:

It isn’t often I have trouble tearing my eyes away from my laptop wallpaper. But these two photos are stunning and I find myself staring often.

A big thank you to Ali at RANet for the large photos! They really did make my week. 🙂

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Make sure to check out posts from all the FanstRAvaganza 4 participates here.