What do y'all use to make them? Is one way better than the other?

Michelle wrote:
What do y'all use to make them? Is one way better than the other?

Making the banners is the easy bit. First you need to consider what 'materials' you'll be using and from where. I recommended asking permission for using fanarts as the base of your banners for stories, challenges, and so on before you make your banners.

Artists, believe me, loathe it when someone takes their art and reproduces it in something without their permission.

Ask first, than if they say it's okay, go ahead and make your banners.

Secondly don't be tempted to use copyrighted images, that aren't yours, that being photographs, stock images, art from official commercial sources, especially from comics, anime, and so forth. You'll be in breach of copyright. Using fanart is a better safeguard, provided that you have the fanartist's permission to use their artwork in your banners.

Thirdly, you can generally make the banners in any good photo-editing program with filters or layer properties. You can also make basic ones in Microsoft Paint, but it's up to you what program you use.

~ Pyre

Ashante shavonne wrote:
so would paint tool Sai be a good banner making program?

Don't know as I've never used it. You could probably google for tutorials on how to make Banners in SAI, or ask around the forum. I generally used the commercial version of Photoshop in the past to colour arts and so forth, but not everyone can gain access to a full working edition of Photoshop, that being because of the 'price-tag' being in the hundreds to thousands of dollars.

I would assume that if you can colour digital art in SAI you could probably use it for other things too.

I'm not familiar with the the program, but other artist's are. Just ask around.

~ Pyre

Ashante shavonne wrote:
ok thank you

You might want to try 'GIMP' too, I've just downloaded and installed it myself and it has much of the same features that Photoshop CS4 had, including the photo-editing properties, filters, and so on, plus you can paint in it too. Better yet it's freeware, it can be a bit jarring to use though, word of warning. The interface isn't at a beginners level, I actually think that they intentionally modeled on the Photoshop GUI (Graphical User Interface), especially in the appearance of the menus, the menu dropdowns, and the display of the windows.

GIMP is also freeware, not shareware like SAI, so you won't be prompted to buy anything or make donations to whatever.

Some like shareware, but I don't, since you usually have to subscribe or buy into something in order to keep using shareware software.

~ Pyre