Just Create - Sweat Edition

[silvercat17]

What are you working on? What have you finished? What do you need encouragment on? Are there any cool events or challenges happening that you want to hype?

Chores and other not-fun things count!

Remember to encourage other commenters and we have a discord where we can do work-alongs and stuff, linked in the sticky

Events I'm running or participating in this month:
Pirate Fest on AllBingo - digital or nautical piracy themed prompts for anything you want to make
Small Web September
Communal Creators - finish projects in September and October

It's hot and I'm very tired of dripping with sweat, but thus is my lot in life

Comments

[soc_puppet]

summerofthe69 is finally over for 2024, phew! It's open for Amnesty fills, but I don't have to do anything for that weekly.

I did a couple loads of laundry this week, as well as changed my sheets and got those folded and washed as well. I also cleaned out a corner of my room that I'd neglected for quite some time, and got some of my books better arranged/stored.

Finally, just for fun, I decided to throw together a jellyfish mood theme. And then made five other colors for it, because why not. I also took the opportunity to ask about submitting them to be site-supported mood themes (and thus usable by anyone, paid account not needed), and apparently that's going to happen now? And same for my fancy rats mood theme? And I am very, very excited about that ♥

[zenigotchas]

The jellyfish are so cute........ Good job on getting them both supported. I have seen your rat moods before and thought they were p adorable. How hard is it to make mood themes? It seems simple but also a bit challenging at the same time.

[soc_puppet]

Thanks! I'm super stoked that they'll both be available for all users, not just anyone who can get a paid account and has the patience to install a custom mood theme.

This gets a bit lengthy, so I'm gonna put it behind a summary/details cut.

More information than you probably want about how to make a mood theme

I'd say that the biggest factor is how complicated you want your mood theme to be. The bare minimum of different images is 15, since a lot of moods "inherit" their images from other moods. 34 is also a good number, since it includes all of the "in-between" moods, where the main moods branch off to moods that also branch off. One of the easier ways to see it is with the hierarchical mood tree for Chasy's Animexpressions, IMO. If you want to make an image for every single mood option, that's 132.

Over at moodthemeinayear, we're scheduled to do three moods a week, with a week off every six weeks or so. We started on January 1st of this year, so we're pretty far in at this point!

That said, for every six week block, I run a "Minimal Mood Theme" alongside the full mood theme. Basically, in addition to the scheduled three moods from the full mood theme list, I list three moods from the minimum 15, plus a specific three in-between moods that give you the best variety of images for your effort. So if you want a community to work with, you're welcome to join us over there! You can do just the Minimal Mood Theme, or do both the MMM and whatever that week's other moods are, or the MMM and pick your favorite from that week's moods, or even do something completely different.


To make a mood theme, you can draw images, take screencaps from your favorite show, edit panels from your favorite comics/manga/etc, make animated gifs, whatever! For my fancy rats mood theme, I sketched out the various moods, scanned them three to six at a time, then colored them in with a drawing tablet. For the jellyfish, I just kinda freehanded based on my very limited knowledge of pixel art.

Images can be .jpg, .png, or .gif format. PNG is recommended over JPG. They can be as big as 100x100 pixels, just like icons! Unfortunately, I'm not sure about file size, so if you want to make huge looping gifs for mood themes, you may have to do some experimenting.

If you want to use a custom mood theme (one that isn't or won't be available here), you need a paid account. Anyone can make a mood theme just for fun, though! You can also use it as an exercise in drawing various characters, including your own OCs.

If you want to make a mood theme that could hypothetically be turned into a site-supported mood theme, this link has some information on that, but it also hasn't been updated in over ten years 😅 Honestly, Team Dreamwidth has been so hard at work on other things with this site, I can hardly blame them! The big thing to remember is that PNG should now be fine for images with transparency, not just GIF.


Once you have your images ready, you upload them somewhere. I used Dreamwidth's native image hosting, but it can be a bit of a pain to use, especially if you're uploading more than twenty images at a time.

When you have all of your images uploaded, you click over to the Mood Theme Manager page. Click to create a new mood theme, then edit it.

On the editing page, all of the moods will be laid out in the hierarchical tree style. For each mood that you've uploaded, copy-paste the corresponding image link into the URL bar. You have to manually input the image dimensions, which can be a pit of a pain, and is why I made all of my rat mood images 100x100 pixels, even if there's extra space I could have cut out 😅 On the plus side, if you uploaded your images to Dreamwidth's image hosting, Dreamwidth will list that information for you in the list view of Your Images. You can also take that information down and name your files that as you go, so the information is built in if you upload your images to a different site.

I think that ought to do it! I also have a couple of guides linked in moodthemeinayear's profile.

We just started a new six-week block last week over at Mood Theme in a Year, for anyone who wants to jump in! Also, starting next block, I'm planning to run a Medium Mood Theme alongside both the regular schedule and the Minimum Mood Theme schedule, so you can follow along and get the all the extra "middle" moods as well, if you want more than just the minimum but don't want to tackle the whole 132. That's what I ended up doing after I found out that denise liked my jellyfish and wanted me to submit them to be a mood theme; I originally only had my preferred 18 plus two just for fun.

Something else that might be fun would be to tackle it as a NaNoWriMo alternative now that that organization is going down the tubes; aim for the 34 Medium Moods and do 1 per day in November, plus one extra on the weekends, and you'll be able to hammer out a pretty diverse mood theme in a month!


So yeah! Those are my thoughts on making a mood theme. I've had a whole lot of fun doing it, and I anticipate making more in the future. I'd love if more people joined me at Mood Theme in a Year, too!