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For a long time, artist's websites I was visiting did not encourage me to make my own, especially because they displayed mainly CG (Computer Graphics), of a quality I thought I could never achieve - for example Aurore "BlackCat" Demilly's (now she's a professional comics artist) or Rafchan's (who was about half my age, to make things worse ^_^"). My pencil sketches and ink paintings were not for the web, and the web was not for me!
Then one day I stumbled on Allfanarts... I immediately took to that community (where many people used traditional - i.e. non-computer - techniques), began to send artworks, to take part in contests... Allfanarts re-awakened my creativity :-)
Finally I discovered Nati-Art, which was called Immature Angel at the time, a name I found quite intriguing. I loved Nati's soft colors - and she used (and still does) only traditional techniques (feltpens, watercolour...), with just a bit of Photoshop for highlights and the like. I felt a kinship with her and her story, and this really decided me to make this site. I hope at least some visitors will feel happy to find my pictures, as I was when I found Nati's...
Finding a name for your site is not easy, especially when you intend to last for a while, and not to keep changing names (bad for Google ranking, that ;-) At first I tried to put my name in, but Reine's World sounded a bit too much like Wayne's World, didn't it? At the same time I was looking for something more poetical (in the Immature Angel vein), I was re-reading Yukito Kishiro's manga Gunnm. There, in my favorite episode, the motorball story, I found the créatures éphémères ("ephemeral creatures") phrase...
For those who know the story, when Shumira takes Ido to the motorball stadium for the first time (because she knows that Gally is among the contestants), the loudspeakers announce the beginning of the race in these terms (translated from the French, so it's probably not like that in the English version!):
Welcome to you all, strange ephemeral creatures...! Now is the time to open the gates of Hell!
Having chosen Free as a provider, I had at my disposal 1 Go of disk space, and the ability to create "sub-accounts" with their own name, e-mail address, 1 Go space; I could use PHP to write dynamic pages and MySQL to setup a database; all for free and without aggressive popups ou banner-adds! What more can you ask for? :-)
So, after choosing the name of my future site, I had to deal with the technicalities, and I didn't know the first word (or rather the first tag...) of HTML. So I set to learning it, and found what I deemed a good introduction on Jukka Korpela's site. This was my first contact with his fascinating site, that broaches topics as apparently far apart as linguistics and webdesign (in English - and also in Finnish...) I was convinced by his essay So you want to create a home page? and I hope I used it well here! Although his style tends to be somewhat pompous and know-it-all, I believe in the core message: when designing a website, think about your visitors, not yourself. Obvious? Or is it?
If you visit Jukka's site, you'll find frequent references to Jakob Nielsen, a web "usability" guru. His short articles ("alertboxes") are usually quite interesting, and once you begin reading them, you'll find you'll quickly get addicted! Not everybody in the webdesign community agree with his theories, but he certainly is a reference for most.
Finally, Diane Wilson has written a series of interesting articles on her specialist field, "Computer-Human Interaction". She reminds us to think about human beings first when developing software - or websites...
Armed with my iBook G4 1GHz under MacOS X, and an "enhanced" text editor: BBEdit (I mostly use its "syntax highlighting" features, which usually prevents you from forgetting to close quotes or tags, and makes it easier to navigate in your file), I soon set to work (well, not so soon, actually ^_^")
For those interested in that kind of things, I use a CanoScan 3200F scanner, a Canon Pixma iP 4200 printer, a Wacom Intuos 3 graphic tablet (A5-size), Photoshop Elements 2.0, Fetch for FTP, several browsers (Internet Explorer - for Mac, that I do not recommend... - Firefox, and since it's been working, Safari, Apple's browser).
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