This is the story of my leaf-buttons. I had designed a new home-page background based on the veining in a leaf, and I thought that it would be cool to have navigation buttons that were little leaves. The kind of leaf I envisioned was translucent, sharing the "aquified" effect of many icons and buttons one sees on the web. To start, I needed a leaf. There's one in the "Summer Leaves" tube that comes with PSPX that I sort of liked.
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This is from the tube. It's a pretty sad little leaf now that I look at it again. I had just upgraded from PSP5 to PSP10, and working on the leaf would let me see how familiar features worked in the new version and let me try out some things that were totally new to me. I began on the leaf, removing the drop shadow and cleaning it up a bit
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—in other words, got rid of its holes, made its veins light, changed its color, and finally stopped myself. (I have the dubious habit of "fixing" things until they're practically unrecognizable.) Looks like I turned the leaf over and found its clean side, doesn't it?
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I vaguely remembered the hot wax effect from PSP5 and thought that maybe hot wax would thicken the leaf. Well, it did thicken the edges; it didn't do quite what I wanted, but it left me with some hope.
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PSP5 doesn't have an enamel effect, so it was new to me. I thought I'd see if it could thicken and smooth the leaf's surface. The enamel showed some promise, but it didn't seem thick enough. I'll have to come back and learn about enameling leaves without darkening them (I'd learned with icons that enameled-gel-gumdrop effects are much easier with light-colored objects).
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Then I got out a Photoshop tutorial I'd saved on making gel shapes in icons; maybe I could apply it to the leaf... That was mostly wishful thinking; they had been simple gel shapes. But did I give up? No, though I think I did abandon this gel effect a little soon; the leaf looks concave, yet if I flipped the highlight so it was in the middle of the leaf... But I had "gumdrop" on my mind.
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I opened up another Photoshop tutorial I'd saved, on making aquified icons with those translucent, doubly-highlighted spheres in them. A leaf is not a sphere, so a lot had to be changed. The inner highlights couldn't be elliptical, nor directly above/below one another, and the serrated edges... After quite some time, the leaf became a —I was going to say: a gumdrop. But it's not thick enough! I didn't want to over-do the effect, but what happened to the thickness I'd painstakingly built up?
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(You have to imagine, here, my near-despair upon seeing this leaf when I posted it on the PSPUG board: I rushed back to the image in PSP, making screenshots so the PSP-transparent-checkered-background showed, hoping that the nicer looking—even if not quite a gumdrop—leaf would look good enough to leave posted... I was reassured, at least, that the thickness wasn't entirely an optical illusion.)
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| My leaf certainly looks fatter with a colored background ---->
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My original notion was to have cutout text on a smaller leaf, for the web-page button. So I cut the text into this leaf. This part I foresaw correctly; a gumdrop is a good place for cutout text, even if this "gumdrop" doesn't look particularly good against white --------->
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I left my gumdrop-against-checkered-background leaves posted and had pretty much concluded that the navigation-buttons idea wasn't workable. If the leaves were
very much smaller, they'd lose definition and might better be replaced with stylized-from-the-start leaves. Then I had occasion to use some leaf-buttons on a page, and I reduced the leaf's size by 20%, and it was still a pretty good leaf....
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