Dreamwidth style system discussion

1. How do I make the userpics appear in Tabula Rasa? Edit: This fixed itself somehow, see below. Some clarification for the future would help though.


2. What all would I need to do, in order to make that comm's style suitable for posting as a new Tabula Rasa layout on dreamscapes? I mean sans the comm-specific customizations. There's all kinds of stuff I'm still learning here, and things that I still need to style, but I'm not sure what the next step should be. (I was thinking of posting the code on Gitorious though.)


3. What's involved in creating a new color layout for an existing theme? Because I was thinking of using Funky Circles for my personal journal, but it needs a new color scheme. I'm thinking "Peanut butter and chocolate."

About that first question: I Firebug-inspected the comments on becomeyourfursona and on a journal that had visible userpics, and I couldn't see any CSS rules that seemed relevant. But after applying the following styles to .comment:

background: none repeat scroll 0 0 #EFEFEF;
margin: 3em 0 4.6em 0;
padding: 2.7em;
position: relative;

... the problem mysteriously solved itself. Any idea why? Was the text element somehow overlapping the userpic due to one or more of those properties not being set?

Thanks again in advance either way!