It’s been live since Monday so I’m breaking the news a little late here—but I have a new layout!

Give me a chance to go all “web-design-nerd” on you and let explain why I wanted a new look:

• For one, I thought the last layout was too crowded. I noticed that the sidebar was distracting the eye from the actual blog posts and the whole thing didn’t look clean. Looking at all the minimalistic designs at SiteInspire made me want to try an all-white layout for myself—so I did!
• The previous version didn’t have any personality. I mean sure, there were little bursts of colors here and there, but it was very meh and I don’t think it really screamed THIS IS HAZEL’S BLOG!!!
• I wanted to incorporate a photograph into the new design. Even back when I still had a sub-domain and when my internet alias was still Lena, I never ever used a photograph in any of my layouts (probably only when I was just starting out and I was still using iframes—blegh!). It’s just been one of my big personal rules to never use an image on my layout that I did not take myself.
  And back then, my photography skills were non-existent, so the idea of taking a picture with my own camera to paste on my website never occurred to me.
• I don’t think I ever had a typical layout with just a header image on top before (I’m usually really obsessed about making my layouts ‘unique’) so I wanted to take a shot at it.

Putting a photo of hazelnuts on the header since my name’s Hazel—I don’t I could get any more personal than that! hahaha~

(notice how I can just keep going on and on and on about website nonsense. I am such a geek! )

Unrelated: On Thursday my art class had life-drawing sessions again (we did it last year too). Meaning a NUDE MODEL came to our class, stood in different poses, and we had to draw her. Unlike last year’s, this one was a lot skinnier—but still equally hairy And this lady kept on bending down in front of us!

Now I find that drawing a voluptuous model is much easier than drawing a thinner one. I guess for me, it’s more natural to draw curves? I dunno.

I’m curious: has any of you that took/takes art in high school had life-drawing lessons in class? I don’t reckon it’s allowed in many schools…

It’s funny how I feel so guilty for not blogging here when in fact, it has only been a week since my last post!  Although now that I think about it, that does seem like a long time compared to the pace of other bloggers But oh well! To each their own, I guess.

Anyhoot, I’m here to announce the addition of my new blog! My new sketch blog, to be precise. click click click:

It’s actually not very new since I opened it at the end of July; I just never really told anyone about it . By starting a sketch blog, I’m hoping to get more use out of my neglected sketchbook and post rough sketches that I’m much too lazy to put in my DeviantArt account. I also think that it’s going to be fun looking back on my old doodles and seeing what was on my mind during those moments. It’ll be interesting to see if I improve!

I decided to use Wordpress to run the sketch blog so that in addition to encouraging myself to draw more, I can finally learn how to work the blogging tool everyone’s been raving about. Now that’s what I call a win-win situation . I’m certainly not as diligent with ‘daily drawing’ as Chris Piascik is, but it’s a start. Oh, and I should make a custom Wordpress theme for the place… anyone know of any good tutorials?

P.S: The ‘content’ section of the site is opened! I added a new tutorial. Next up: a .htaccess tutorial.

After a whole month of brainstorming, sketching and coding, I’ve finally finished the layout! To be honest, this wasn’t what I had in mind when I first decided to redesign Sunshined.org. I was planning to make it the complete opposite of the previous version: clean, white and bright. I was also going to make it entirely on Adobe Illustrator. But as you can see, some things don’t always go according to plan. And I’m fine with that!

Here is one of the prototypes I made:

I was so so sure I was going to use this one. But after a few days of looking at it, I ended up scrapping the whole thing. I thought it looked a bit too plain and that wasn’t what I wanted. I was aiming for unique not bland. All I took from the original design was the logo, the navigation and the overall color palette:

After I scrapped the previous plan, I had to start brainstorming an entirely new one. I tried sketching out some stuff and vectoring on Illustrator, but it didn’t work out. Then, one day, I spotted my Dad’s pad of yellow lined paper lying on the coffee table. I really liked the worn-out look of it, so I scanned it.

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