Thank me for half of this and WordPress for the other. I was getting sick of seeing the old, dark design and had to do something about it. I just put up a bunch of photo albums so I wanted something a lot lighter that would showcase those pages rather than have them surrounded in darkness. I was too lazy to recode an actual layout so I’m using this default “2010″ theme that comes with WordPress and I spiced it up with my own – you guessed it – airplane illustration.

I used to use an old version of Adobe Illustrator for this sort of thing, but after getting rid of Windows on my desktop, I had to find an open source alternative. After trying out Inkscape a few months ago for Andrew’s birth announcements, I knew it would work, but wasn’t too keen on the idea of having to relearn such a program. Having to do a little project for my husband this morning, I was faced with having to learn more than just the basics and now we have what you see here. This stuff is addictive. Once I start, I can’t stop.

Here’s the original image (a photo I took of the 900 in the hangar in DTW)

And the illustrated one

I highly recommend Inkscape. I know my only comparison is to an old version of Illustrator (have no idea how the newest version would stack up), but I think it’s much easier to use and MUCH lighter in terms of memory hogging. I’m satisfied. For now, at least.

Edit: It hasn’t even been a day and I’ve already changed it. Haha.