At one point in my life, I had a tendency to create a new banner every few chapters for my stories. I Shall Believe alone has about six or seven banners. Because I only use one on the story pages, most of the older banners never come up for air and were generally used when I posted them on message boards.

But I feel like they should gather dust in my website folder, so here we are: Banner Retrospectives. A look back at all my banners and how far I’ve come as a graphic artist.

I Shall Believe

This is the one banner not created by me. Lerdo was a fantastic graphics artist back in 2003-08.

This was my attempt to combine all the women along with their main story counterparts. To my knowledge, Sage never shared screentime with Lucas which I thought was kind of annoying. He was ready made for a love interest and he didn’t really need to complicate the Dillon/Georgie storyline.

I don’t like this banner. Not even a little bit.

   This was part of the same graphics package, with the same lyrics and the same design. I made the Sage banner first, but never made one for Courtney that I liked or kept apparently. The Sage/Maxie one doesn’t really fit in, but it uses the same font so I must have made it at the same time.

   So these four are clearly part of the same graphics package, as a way to highlight all four characters. Eileen Boylan played Sage for such a short time that I was incredibly limited in the amount of screencaps that were available for her.

And this was a combination of all the characters.

 

Why didn’t I use any of these banners during the second posting? Well, I’ve decided since I’ll be working on a sequel some point where I’m using Laura Wright and Ryan Carnes rather than Tamara Braun and CJ Thomason, none of these worked. But I think I like the second set of the four women graphics the best.

Shadows

 

 

So of the Shadows banners, I like the last two the best. I didn’t use them for the rewrite because I aged Michael and shifted the storyline quite dramatically, so it didn’t make a lot of sense to use them. Plus, the earlier banners reflected my choices before I became comfortable with Adobe Photoshop.

Daughters

 

With the exception of the second to last banner which used Amber Tamblyn as Emily rather than Natalia Livingston, all of these banners were fine. I decided to go with the third banner because I wanted to start brushing up on Photoshop, but my Daughter series are the few banners I like as a group.

Unused Banners

There was once a challenge at The Canvas called The Banner Challenge in which you had to write a story based on the characters in the banner. This was my contribution. I’m not sure who received this challenge, so I don’t know what happened to it. I know I also received a banner and wrote a story, but I have no idea which one it was.

A banner for the original version of The Best Thing. Went unused because, ha, NONE of the characters save Elizabeth show up in the story.

In 2003, there was a brief storyline where Lorenzo used a Lily lookalike to gaslight. Sonny. I contemplated doing a story set around this but it never went anywhere.

I…have no idea what I was going to do here.

I liked this song, I liked thse photos. I thought about doing a song fiction, but it kind of never happened.

I wrote a little bit of this story once set in 2004 when Sonny shut the door on Carly after finding her with Lorenzo and tried to keep her from Michael and Morgan. It was going to be something that sent her to AJ for help. I don’t know what happened to those files but it never went anywhere.

 

I made a banner and titled a story without a concept and never did anything with it. I cannot bring myself to get rid of this banner since, ha, I really like it. I might still do something for it one day.

 

So I missed the tenth anniversary of the website in 2002, and then the twelfth. Haha, so while attempting to reconstruct some of the lost and abandoned stories, I was using the Internet Wayback Machine on a site where I know my fanfiction was hosted before much of it was lost and decided to go back about eleven years to visit the kind of writer I used to be. There aren’t many of us Liason writers left from the days 😛

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