I’ve been admiring assignments like the Shakespearean LOLcat for a while now, and this time I decided to stop analyzing and start paralyzing with my awesome art! I knew the quote I wanted to do right away. It’s a line I’ve repeated regularly since reading Antony & Cleopatra in undergrad because I love the way it sounds—and it allows me to condescend my egregiously green judgement in the past. I’m just glad we didn’t have Facebook then, but I digress. It’s from the very end of Act 1, Scene 5 and spoken by Cleopatra when she is bemoaning her youthful fling with Ceasar:
My salad days,
When I was green in judgment: cold in blood,
To say as I said then! But, come, away;
Get me ink and paper:
He shall have every day a several greeting,
Or I’ll unpeople Egypt.
Given the focus on salad days for this quote, I then searched for a LOLcat and salad on Google and found this bit of magic, in animated GIF form no less.
So, I downloaded the GIF and brought it into GIMP with the idea that I would add the quote to every layer. But it turns out this animated GIF was done as a mask (you can see how to do GIF masks in GIMP here) which means much of the background is untouched— and the GIF is smaller and cleaner. After realizing this, I simply aligned the text on areas that do not animate, and merge them down to the background layer. This made the text appear consistently. The only other hack around was airbrushing a black background for the second part of the quote because the green was getting lost in the log. I tried adding a drop shadow to the edges, but for some reason couldn’t do it in this GIF—anyone have any ideas why not?
Anyway, that was fun, and 2.5 stars to boot 🙂
