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.

1541 Marketing

My wife's new business has opened up a creative avenue for me.  Not only have I designed her website and her business cards but I've just done a banner ad for the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland (out in the May 2012 issue, hopefully).

Actually, it's not an entirely new idea (as it's based on one of the images we use on the website and on the business cards) but at least it did get me back into GIMP again and helped refresh a few of the skills I'd forgotten I had.

As noted before I'm not at all keen on the normal corporate approach or images and so have gone for something that I hope that you won't see very often in a sober and traditional Scots lawyers' publication.

The idea was to do something striking, intriguing and simple that would catch the attention and draw the reader in, even if only for a few seconds.  In other words:

1) "Hey, interesting image"
2) "Eh, 1541?  What's that supposed to be?"
3) "Ah, I get it."

Something like that anyway. As the Journal has a circulation of 20,000 lawyers we reckon that if we get one new client (or just two small jobs on the back of it) it will be worth it.  Ah, creativity!

1541 IPA

Being a rather eclectic chap I'm always looking for new activities and interests.  The latest is beer making.  This has been prompted not only by my creative urges but also the exasperation that a pint of decent beer in the pub in Edinburgh (Deuchar's IPA, for example) currently costs £3.30.  Yes children I can remember when beer was less than a pound and in fact recall fondly the days (c.1986) when a pint (of McEwan's lager, admittedly) cost 64p in the Queen Margaret Union Bar at Glasgow University.

The exasperation comes in when you consider that, even with blatant profiteering by the oil companies a pint of beer is still four and a half times more expensive than a pint of petrol (at £1.35 a litre say, or approximately 78p a pint)

The point here is that petrol is the finite resource, not the beer, unless there are whole bunch of beer wells in the North Sea or (crivens!) Saudi Arabia running dry that we weren't told about. Anyway, once you've collected the kit and the empty beer bottles, making beer is not only cheaper (it works out at about 50p a pint) but it also allows one to be creative, as mentioned above.

In preparation for bottling my first batch of India Pale Ale (IPA) I decided to make up some labels in GIMP and as an added wheeze I'm going to use them as light-hearted marketing for my partner's new business (mentioned below).  So here are the labels I've designed using the banners from her website (which I designed), the company name (well, I am a Director, you know) and even the fonts we use (Georgia and Lucida Sans Console, if you must know).

You can see how they link to the 1541 banners I posted about earlier and also the heading of this very blog.  I'm intending to bottle it tonight so here's hoping that once conditioned (takes about two weeks) that the beer tastes as good as I think the labels look....