Tuesday 4 July 2017

Wallpaper with Tentacles

As far as I am aware, no-one visits this blog apart from me.  Therefore, it will have come as a surprise to absolutely nobody at all that (as of June 2017) I changed the look of the blog when I decided that it should have more of a RPG slant (plus selected PC games).

As part of that redesign I considered altering the header to include the background picture of the charming investigator used for the Achtung! Cthulhu investigator's guide. However, in the end I decided to rotate various RPG related pictures I like in the header, so the investigor can rest here until it's her turn to be featured again.
In addition, I changed the blog's wallpaper from just boring black to a repeating pattern (see below, if you can).
Any colour you like, as long as it's brown
I quite like the pattern idea that actually looks like antique wallpaper, which is what my wargaming blog uses.  The intention of that, with its pale brown background and Casper David Friedrich header, was to go for more of what I regard as a sort of mid-nineteenth century 'Turgenev' effect (I'll explain it one day).

However, for Eclectic Infinities I thought that something darker and more Mythos oriented would be appropriate.  A couple of googled wallpaper tiles were therefore considered, as follows:
Too squiggly
Too 'arts and crafty'
Too beige-y
Too paisley, though encouragingly protozoan
However, in the end I plumped for the obvious one, a repeating tile of greenish cephalopods, reminiscent of you-know-who.
Too... actually, no, I may be on to something here
Nevertheless, it wasn't exactly what I wanted, so I stuck it in GIMP (which is free, open source and really good).  The first thing to do was to make the tile a bit more like something that had been badly printed, so basically I put it through the standard 'photocopy' filter setting.  This produced a black and white image like an old Xerox copy.

I then altered the colour scale so it was more of a dark brown, which is usually what happens to the pigments in Victorian wallpapers after a century or so of inexorable oxidation (at least the ones I've encountered in Edinburgh tenements); not to mention the slow mouldering away perhaps caused by unspeakable horrors lurking insidiously behind the wainscoting...  Perfect.

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