I thought I’d spotlight two different fanfiction banners for this week – I did them both during July of 2009, and they’re both centering on ‘Dreamer’ pairing stories. First, ‘Not Written Yet’, which I wrote and finished many years ago, in the winter and spring of 2005, an alternate version of the episode ‘End of the world.’
The other story is much newer, in fact, I was writing it at the time for JulNoWriMo 2009 at the same time as I was doing the banner. It’s a followup to my epic storyline ‘Fateful Moments,’ and it has a very long title which I managed to fit into the banner: “Las Cruces Rendezvous and the battle of Carlsbad.
Looking at both of these pictures at the same time, I see some traits in common. Both of them use a lot of small images, nine for ‘Not Written yet’ in a rough three by three grid, and seven for ‘Las Cruces…’, with three across the top, three across the bottom, and only one in the middle. ‘Las Cruces’ was something of a challenge to find pictures to illustrate a storyline that didn’t really have that much in common with the show – I used a capture of Max in a silly outfit from Isabel’s bewitched fantasies to represent his uniform when he comes back from another planet, for instance. ‘Not Written Yet’ was actually easier, I was able to pull a lot of screencaps from the original episode ‘End of the World’ that could represent different things in my version.
Step 5 in my usual fanart process would probably be adding the words – the ‘Text’ feature in Microsoft Paint is really good at this, allowing you to use any font or color, and a transparent background so the words can be on top of a vidcap. A useful tip is to always draw a small area for the text to start out with – you can drag it bigger, but never smaller than you start with, and even if you’re only putting words in a small part of the area, you can’t drag the area so that a part of it goes off the edge of your image.
The Kelworth Files 