scraps

[Dark Ninja]

what do you do with all the scrap skins that dont quite make it,do you delete them or keep parts to use on another skin

i`m only askin this cause i have about 6 scrap skins and i thought i`d just see if i can merge some parts to make one good one,
i came up with an idea,
imagine you could cut a hole in your desktop with a lazer cutter and fit in a winamp player
just go with me on this ok,
it`s a pretty wierd idea but here`s what i have at the moment,the desktop is the orange part
i decided to call it scraps aswell

maybe some of you could do the same and see what you come up with,post em up on this thread,

it`s all about the spares

[flatmatt]

I leave them in my skins folder until I decide that the methods used to originally create them are too outdated for me to ever finish them. Which could mean years.

Right now I'm looking back and wishing I had finished two of these particular skins. I really like what I had done. Who knows, I still might, but college is taking too much of my time at the moment and the free time I have available isn't going to be spent on skinning at the moment. Plus I'm missing one of the fonts I need for one of them; I thought I copied all the fonts from the old computer to this one, but apparently I was wrong. I'll have to get it when I go home this weekend.

Anyway, I generally only like to show unfinished skins that I will definitely never finish. I have a page for such skins at http://www.flatmatt.com/gallery_unreleased.html

[flatmatt]

Sorry about the double-post, but reading your post more thoroughly made me think of one more skin I might be willing to show. I had a crazy idea once to combine all my classic skins into one (including some of the never-finished skins). It turned out... well, it definitely needed a better background. Here it is, for the first time in public...

[Dark Ninja]

i hate unfinished skins thats why i`m doing this really,
i have too many of em so hopefully i can make one good one

[flatmatt]

Psst... Your eject button's upside-down.

Seriously, it's looking good. I like the one-pixel strip of transparency at the top.

[Dark Ninja]

Shhh....i know,i`m just hoping no one else notices

[StillWater]

I went through all my unfinished skins, and it turns out that I've got 9 of them So, I thought, why not take the occasion to write a novel at the forums about it

click here to see them all (360kb JPG). Some are very old, some are newer. There's a small possbility I might finish a couple of them, but most of them are long dead.


(from left to right, starting from top row)
1 - A skin based on a painting by the terrific Polish surrealist painter Zdzislaw Beksinski (he makes Dali look like a hack. Although Dali was a hack, so that's not hard ). Check out his awesome Flash site. My terrible boxy PSP effects did neither the painting nor the skin any justice.

2 - A remix of my "Zima" skin which was based on the official poster of the 2003 Melbourne International Film Festival. I love the festival and go every year, and the poster image was so colouristically similar to my Zima skin that I just had to make a remix. Well almost...

3- A Milkdrop-themed skin that I was trying to make. It was my most ambitious ever skin at that point, and the project eventually caved in under the weight of my poor graphics skills. If I had ever finished it, I think it was going to get put on the Milkdrop site as the official Milkdrop skin. So it's a good thing I never finished it, as - looking at it now - it would have looked horrendous

4 - My remix of marc falk's "parrallell futures 3" skin. I came sooo close to finishing this one, yet not close enough

5 - A skin commemorating the Solidarity movement of Poland, which was one of the most important and influential organisations of the 20th Century. It was a worker's union that gained so much popular support that it became powerful enough to force the Communist Party to negotiate with it. After a very difficult 10-year long battle, Solidarity finally succeeded in toppling the Communist goverment. After the precedent was set in Poland, the others fell like dominoes: Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, etc. etc. and eventually the USSR itself.

In a century marred by bloodshed and war, Solidarity profoundly demonstrated to the world that even a behemoth like Communism can be overcome by organised, peaceful resistance - even where violent uprising has failed. Solidarity was a source of significant inspiration for various groups around the world, perhaps most notably the South African blacks who eventually defeated Apartheid.

For me, it's a huge travesty that 15 years on, many more people remember the fall of the Berlin Wall than remember Solidarity, even though the latter was so much more significant and started it all. That was the motivation for starting this skin (It was my utterly insignificant attempt to fight this travesty ). Although as you can see, my design was terrible, and I never got very far.

6 - I never got the balance between the torn poster and the bricks right on this. I was quite pleased with how I got around the perenial repetitive-EQ-bar problem on this though.

7 - "e-quarium". This is one of the few that I might even finish one day. I even completed the volume animation (a swimming jellyfish) - it took me hours to do, though in the end, it doesn't look very good

8 - This is one of the older ones that I almost definitely won't finish.

9 - Someone once emailed me asking me if I could make a skin for their website, about a German singer that I'd never heard of. I said sure, if I have time, why not. Though as you can see, I never finished it...

[tydogg]

That e-quarium looks pretty tight. Finish it

[LuigiHann]

Let's see, how many skins have I not finished?
1. Pong - A black skin with white pixelly buttons and cool animated sliders. Got old fast.
2. Zelda Amp 4 - JJPotter did one from the same game that was better than mine would have been
3. Ecto Coolamp - Based on the best Juice box ever, but I ran out of photoshop.
4. Zelda Amp 64 - Was working on it around the same time as Ecto Coolamp, but have started putting it together again with Xeno. Gradually.
5. Mario & Luigi -Based on the GBA sequel to Paper Mario, I was having trouble because the sprites were all just too darn big for the buttons.
6. Super Mario Kart - I think I will finish that skin sometime, but I left in on my old computer before I left for college.
7. Where's Waldo - Started for the contest, too ambitious, didn't work out.

I think there are more that I can't think of now. 3-7 you can still probably find threads for if you search this forum.

[flatmatt]

StillWater, if you don't finish number 8 I will... umm... Send you spam e-mails until you do!

[Dark Ninja]

i like StillWater`s brick one and the one with the little fishes,
he he,looks pretty cool,
you should finish em up,i`d download em

hav`nt done a lot to this just recently but i`m going for an all in one unit,
i`ve also decided to make it more 3d looking by taking certain parts down -10 darkness so it looks more angular,
there is also the originl nums/nums ex in there too,
just need to scuff it up a bit

[Dark Ninja]

well,gone through the whole thing and changed quite a bit to this,
probly one of those type of skins you`ve got to work at to get it how you want,right,

this is taking ages,i`m usually done the 3 windows by now
ditched all the cbuttons volume and everything,
i dont know what to do,i`m not liking this

[tydogg]

With the changes you've made, you either need to make your cbuttons similar to your eject button or get rid of it, because it doesn't fit the theme. I like the texture you've added.

[Dark Ninja]

yeah,thats one of the problems i`m having,
cbuttons/eq screen/and volume/bal

i`ve altered where the cbuttons go about 7 times and the eq screen at the top is annoying me and i`m trying to come up with something good for the vol/bal,
i have a headache...

[Doggy Dog]

flat.... you really should've finished Winamp Island... great idea.. or maybe I should've finished it when you told me I could (if I remember correctly).

Anyway, I scrapped a lot of skins before I even started properly working on them... and lost some in hd crashes.

After a few sketches, scrapped a modern skin idea (it was a good idea, but it probably wouldnt've been allowed here, and I can't code so I gave up completely) which I told some of you about.

And there was another skin that I was working on that I got bored of (cos it was a bit ugly), and gave it to Peacemaker if he wanted to do something with it or if he could give me some ideas about it. He obviously wouldn't (cos it was ugly), and I lost it, so that counts as scrapped too.

Oh, just remembered now, had another pretty plain modern skin ("inspired" by Simple and Marko Amp ). I finished doing the main window graphics for, but never bothered to finish it cos it was too simple looking (and as I said, I can't code).



Hmmm..... that Solidarnost skin was a good idea btw, Stillwater, you should finish some of the others too.

[flatmatt]

Originally posted by Doggy Dog
flat.... you really should've finished Winamp Island... great idea.. or maybe I should've finished it when you told me I could (if I remember correctly).

Oh, it's getting there, just not in a way one might expect. Not any time soon, though.

[Dark Ninja]

given up with that coding malarky...PPFFTT!

[Dark Ninja]

mmm...maybe something good with trying to use my scraps then,
totally remoddled,
you`ll see a pic in my skin preveiw and i thought i`d see what you think,
i`m going to redo the vol/bal aswell,thats one of the things that really bugs me

[LuigiHann]

*bump*
I just made this montage of all the skins I've started without finishing, like StillWater did. Some of them I may finish if I get inspired, but most of them probably not. I left some out.

(Click for fullsize)
If you don't recognise one, here's the list, top to bottom and left to right:
Super Mario Kart, LEGO, Dr. Mario, Myst, FLCL, Mario & Luigi, Yoshi's Touch & Go, Where's Waldo. You could probably guess most of those.

[EmpireForum]

Nice skin!

[LuigiHann]

That, sir, is an absolutely enormous signature.

[Mr Jones]

It was.