Although it hasn't yet been sent to FKFIC-L, "The Sun of Cairo" is now up on my website. To make its webpage (which is here), I went with a sky blue gradient coupled with a frame dominated by a sand-textured graphic. (The connection with Egypt should be obvious.) The fact that the sword I used as decoration is actually a claymore off a website of Scottish graphics—well, I'm no weapons expert to care a lot about accuracy, and it works visually.

The gradient I used for the background was made at GRSites.com, a graphics site that I've used a lot, especially for tweaking graphics. However, the guy who owns it has also recently added a new thingie that does gradients of all sorts. It's far fancier than the old one he had. So I was also able to make a radial gradient, i.e. one that has one of the colours shading out from a single point through the second colour. In this case, I used a blue background and used white for shading. The result looks a lot like the sun in a blue sky.

Since there was no way the two gradients could match up, I used the "sun" behind the title, and then put it inside a frame. Because the frame sets it off, you don't notice that the colour at the edges doesn't quite match the colour of the gradient used as the background for the whole page.

To make the radial gradient look more natural, I set it so that it would be off-centre in the frame. (Well, I hope so. One can't be quite sure how things look on other people's monitors.) The joke, of course, is that, if I had put it dead centre it would have looked artificial—nature never being so perfectly balanced—yet the opening line of the story places the time as noon, when the sun should be right overhead!

I've been playing a lot with Microsoft Paint lately. Here, I've used it twice. First, I copied an Egyptian vulture from a photo to use in the header of the second section of the story (and, by "copying", I mean using the photo as a model, not tracing over it). There are three vultures in the header; but it doesn't take all that close a look to realize that they are actually all the same original, just done in different sizes.

I needed an illustration for the final section of the story also. However, I decided it would do better at the end of the text, separating it from the notes. (The original post on fkcommentfic didn't have notes; but I decided they were really needed, since "Sun of Cairo" has an historical setting.) After debating with myself what would be best, I decided to see if I could modify the claymore to symbolize Nick's capture. So I rotated it to lie horizontal. Then, since that didn't look very good, I disassembled the handle, rotated it, relocated it, and did a bit of nasty work pixel by pixel to try to make the colour look smooth. I even thought to lift the line down the blade, since the perspective would be different. Still, the thing didn't look right. Finally, I realized that, when a sword is laid down, the thickness of the handle means that it actually slopes down to the tip. So it was back to Microsoft Picture Manager for some fine tuning.