spkathrine | Icon Post #2 (Mass Update 10/3/08)

Current Mood: creative

Icon Post #2 (Mass Update 10/3/08)

I've decided to just go with the flow and not separate all of the icons by fandom. I'll just keep putting up new posts each time I fill one up. If you're looking for my older icons then they will be on Icon Post #1.

So enjoy my latest icons and remember that creditting me is always optional, but please credit the artists of any fanart I use. I always enjoy comments that let me know which icons people like most.

D.N.Angel

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

Kyou Kara Maou

Naruto

fanart by

kuroikisei

(2nd Icon not LJ compatible)

fanart by gabzillaz

fanart by orin

(Tatoeba Kimi Ga by 10 Rankai doujinshi scan done by arigatomina)
(Shikisokuzeku by Engawaken doujin scan borrowed from arigatomina)

fanart by fukkafyla
fanart by keikoc AKA kumo

(added 10/3/08)
(fanart by Batsu13angel)

Bleach
(Warera no Houfuku no Tameni Shi ni Irite by ANOYOROSHI doujin scan borrowed from arigatomina/Layann)

Gundam 00

fanart by pigtail78
(added 10/3/08)

D.Gray-man (added 10/3/08)

(art from "La Famille 2" doujinshi)

Link to DGM Dancing Commercial

Vampire Knight (added 10/3/08)

Non-Fandom-Centric Icons

Miscellaneous Fandoms

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don't break up all your icon posts by fandom. When you fill this one up like you did the last one, create a new one. This way you can show time differences and/if you had any progress between the posts. Besides, you might end up making too many icons for one fandom and come up with this problem all over again.

You're really on a Greta streak, ne? thats alright tho, since she is cute, and the puzzle one is really nice.

That's a pretty good idea, because it would be a good way to measure my progress. I should probably pick out the icons I've made since my last sharing post (of any fandom) and put them here, so that the more recent ones are together.

Yes I'm definitely on a Greta streak. There just aren't enough Greta-icons around. ^_^ Thanks!

Take some Naruto icons for my collection
OMG, "Orochi-chan"! This icon made me real crazy! =3333
Thank you so much for the great work :)

It really makes me happy when I find people who enjoy more than one fandom of my icons. ^_^

That would be my own personal quirk for calling him Orochi-chan, the He-Queen of Pedophiles. So of course, Kabuto would have to use it as well. ^_~

Naruto "NO BUTTSECKS? D:" icon for the win, and ultra lulz. XD ganked along with several others. <3

^_^ Thank you! I'm happy to share and glad that you found so many that you enjoy. ♥

Hey,

I used to read your Gundam Wing stories on ff.net and I loved them (remember bunches_o_nuts? It's me)! I wasn't able to get a hold of you the regular way (you know, through email), so I thought I'd try this. Hope you don't mind, and if you do, feel free to delete it. Just try to contact me first at summer_skye22@comcast.net (especially if you are interested in the story below)

Recently, my friend, Cat, and I decided to begin our own story. We are both in a graduate program for Speech Pathology and Audiology and are currently enrolled in a class regarding Aphasia (an acquired disorder that occurs after trauma to the brain that affects all forms of language). While beginning this story, we thought we should find out if anyone else would be interested in taking on a challenge for a fic. This is our challenge, if you decide to take it. Feel free to let us know if it started any plot bunnies.

Whatever your occupation is (or once wished/still wish to become) that was in the service profession (doctor, nurse, occupational therapist, etc), choose a disorder, disease or syndrome (rare or common) that effects one (or all) of the boys and their reactions to it. It would be nice to see new and different pairings other than the common straight pairings (1xR, 2xH, 3xC, 4xD, 5xS) or the homosexual pairings (1x2, 3x4).

Let me know what you think and your interest (or lack there of). Hope to hear from you soon!

Summer

I like your Naruto icons and I snagged a bunch. The wittiness and crack is great. As for improvement, on the manga coloring the skin tone is off in a lot of the icons. Basically it is too yellow. (At least on my monitor.. so uhm, ask for some other opinions too.. hopefully my monitor isn't off-color!)

I was lazy in coloring this pic, but it's an example of a more natural skin tone: http://i167.photobucket.com/albums/u149/ladygith/psychoVday_ladygith.gif

Also I don't use this, but I found it in a coloring tutorial. ~~I personally think the lightest tone is too pink, but it's an opinion!~~ http://i167.photobucket.com/albums/u149/ladygith/skinpallette.jpg

Hopefully some of that helps. :D

I spoke to my close friend who is an artist, darksahdow on DA if you've ever seen her work, since you had mentioned (I think in the chuunin post) for comments on improvement and this is what was said:

xSharinganHeirx: they asked for comments on improvement :P
darksahdow: on icon making?
xSharinganHeirx: on their icons yeah
darksahdow: she could use some work on choseing the right font and color
xSharinganHeirx: yes, but i'm not always good at that and not uh.. i don't know how to suggest improvements on that XD
xSharinganHeirx: like.. without redoing icons of hers with better examples
darksahdow: icons and on re-sizeing a picture, that what she needs to imporve xD
darksahdow: u could show her better exampls
xSharinganHeirx: hmm where do you mean resizing a picture? maybe i'm too tired to notice that XD
darksahdow: http://i178.photobucket.com/albums/w251/SPkathrine/Icons/NaruSakuSasuIcon.gif like this one
darksahdow: its badly edited
xSharinganHeirx: ah yes
darksahdow: other than that and the font the rest is good
darksahdow: it would be nice if she added more texture and design to the icons to make it more creative
xSharinganHeirx: i think a lot of her creativity is in the crack/witty text
xSharinganHeirx: like i love some of it, even if the icon itself isn't that great
darksahdow: her words might be awsome to read
darksahdow: but the font style doesn't go well with the image
====================================
So, in order to offer examples I did actually remake one of my favorite icons of the post that could use a slight makeover! I hope you don't mind as I'm only trying to help. ^^; The link is a bunch of variations using one or both of the textures listed below or solid colors that better compliment the rest of the icon.
http://s167.photobucket.com/albums/u149/ladygith/spkatherine/

Photoshop CS2
Font: Candara
Textures used:
Celestial Star designs (http://celestial-star.net/) soft light #29
Yumei-k @

100x100_brushes my mind #48

Thank you very much for the critique, because that is something that I really appreciate.

Yes, majority of my creativity is in text...I atually only started making icons, just for something different to do, and now I've become very invested in it. Unfortunately, some of your suggestions are ones I'm not capable of doing simply because I don't have Photoshop. -_- I borrow the program on my school's computers if I need to, but to do all of my icons with it would have me in the computer lab for hours and hours. I use a free program called "PhotoFiltre," which means all of my textures are on the somewhat limited side...

That NaruSakuSasu Icon is definitely not one of my betters *headdesk*...that's why I made so many, I couldn't find one I thought looked nice enough, but I hate to get rid of physical progress. The final one is much better, but I still could do something else with it...

I saw the different variations you made to the icon and I like them, because it lets me see what you're talking about, except for the pink...(as you can tell I'm more of a dark color person and for the most part don't use light colors, such as pink and yellow, which irritate my eyes just looking at them. But I guess just because I don't like them doesn't mean I shouldn't use them when they're appropriate, right?) And I'm horrible with backgrounds, so I usually remove them from the equation altogether and go with a solid color and maybe a texture. Shading is something I'm still trying to learn... I can't use layers with PhotoFiltre, which is what I've been told you should use to make them. Are there other ways to do them without using that?

I've never actually put much thought into the font and how it effects the icon, as I am limited to what I have and what I can find on Free-Font websites. I just usually go with what looks like it's readable because sometimes my "nicer" fonts leave much to be desired in the forms of legibility once shrunk to icon size. But that "Candara" you used is a nice bold one that is easy to read. I'll have to look around and see if I can find it/something like it.

I'm going to have to disagree with you about skintones though. The tones you show for example don't seem like proper ones for Naruto. I know my skin tones aren't the best, but I'm not going for a "natural human" look as much as I'm going based off the colors on my manga covers and colored chapter covers. Sasuke's skintone always appears a mix of yellows, oranges, and light tans (not including the cover/chapter cover of him in CS2). There is no pink in his skintone whatsoever. Some of the skintones are messed up on purpose due to the saturation/contrast/gamma lighting/effect and such I was using at the time, but yeah, for the most part I just need to work on them not all being so obviously different colors (and not so yellow...because some do look far too yellow after upping the saturation).

Thank you very much for all of the suggestions! I really appreciate them and definitely see ways I can improve from your comments. They really do help, even if sometimes hearing all the ways improvements can be made is a little hard.

=O I never heard of it. To not have layers though.. wow~ I think layers make it so much easier. Not knowing the program, I can't really offer any plausible suggestions on it's use. You would know it far more than me!

I see where you are coming from with the skintone, actually. To be honest, the only reason I even noticed is because I have friends critique my graphics a lot. More than just that one friend, although her career is in graphic arts and she's usually the most honest with the best suggestions for improvement. ~~Even if it IS hard to hear them.~~ I used to go with the yellower skin tone as well, but it kept coming up as suggestions for change. Most of the skin tones I use for Naruto icons now are eye judgement, but I had started using color samples from the anime after being told a few times the skin was too yellow. As always, colors really are a personal preference and thus nothing more than opinion. :D

I get most of my fonts from dafonts.com. I do see a lot of variance in the fonts that you use. Does your program allow for anti-aliasing of text and/or effects on it? Not that I'm the best at critiquing in that area, like I mentioned in the convo with my friend. I just know a few ways to make the text more subtly readable.

Either way, as I said in my first post, I snagged a lot of your icons! The critique possibly came off a bit harder than it meant to be, so I'm glad/hope you didn't take it too hard. Icons are art anyway, and really art is nothing more than an opinion or taste~ Your definite strength lies in the witty text. I adore it! I read the icons and just think 'wow, I wish I could have thought of that.' Also the animation is very good! I do look forward to seeing more of your icon posts.

OH. And see, I'm slow at thinking. I think you could do wonders with a program that allows for more versatility. Have you ever heard of GIMP? ( http://www.gimp.org/ ) It's a free program as well and many people use it as an alternative to photoshop. ~~of course, if you wanted photoshop.. idostillhavemyworkingversionofps7andtheserialcode~~

I've never heard of "GIMP" before... But it looks interesting. Thanks for the heads up! I'll definitely have to check it out. ♥

PhotoFiltre is just like Photoshop, only it provides a less extensive free-version and seems to have a lot more in some ways of editting variety as it has borders, unique textures/visual effect, and it has guides for accurate cropping (which is teh best for animated gifs). It just lacks the nice text-editting (such as like WordArt from MSWord) and only has some of the features of the full version, so after a while the variety gets used up.

A lot of people are into the realistic of art, but I've always liked the way Kishimoto colors them, so I try to emulate...although it's a work in progress XP.

I'll have to look that website up. I used to have a laptop that had over 700 fonts on it, but then it got stolen and I lost them all...including all of my LOTR fonts and Elven language programs *le sigh*. So I love getting new fonts. ♥ Photofiltre does allow for anti-analias, bt effect for text end up effect the surrounding area as well, so I only play around with angles and such.

No, I didn't take it too hard, but it does give me some things to consider. And improvement is always great. I think my "wittiness" comes from just be an all around yaoi fangirl who sees sexual innuendo in everything ~~(I should really get around to making that slash-o-meter icon...)~~. I blame my childhood and Sigmund Freud, that always seems to work for people. XD

Oh man, sorry to hear about the laptop. I love fonts too. I have so many of them it's just insane. I mostly use dafonts but I think there is another site 1000fonts.com also that I've used. ...I can't seem to find my bookmark of it!

Look into the program though if at least for layers and maybe text editing. I use more than photoshop myself since some programs just simply do what I want easier or better or I don't know how to do it in another program. lol

I vary on my taste in realistic vs unrealistic? I agree to do what you like best, even if other people may disagree and say to do what the 'audience' likes best. *shrug* Art should be done for oneself first, I think, when it's done for enjoyment.

I do totally disagree about underestimating your ability to see inneundo and come up with interesting ways of saying things. It is a gift that a lot of people don't have or try and just don't do it right. You just seem to be a natural for it! ~~But I'm sure all that you mentioned helps with ideas.~~

Thanks, but I got it back about 10 months later, only it had been wiped of the pretty fonts I loved and majority of what I had left on it ~~(except the Sailor Moon Sailor Stars episodes I'd downloaded for some reason...)~~

Yeah, I've been using the Photoshop program in the compuer lab lately for my animated gifs because you can put more slides on it. Some times a mix of programs can make a really fabulous icon. ^_^

Thank you. hearts; ^_^ I'm not trying to downplay the crack or anything, but I was never this cracky before I got into yaoi/shounen ai/fandom XP. Seriously, I have no idea where it comes from. It may just be all the repressed humor from my years of writing angst/torture/and-more-angst fanfiction with no outlet for the humor. I still can't seem to write a crackfic to save life.

Hey, so it's okay for me to use an icon if I credit you, right? AWESOME work, by the way. <3

Actually you can use my icons even if you don't credit. But doing so is always appreciated. ^_^ Thanks very much!

Hi! *waves*

I'm actually asking your permission to use the Dancing Gwendal icon you've made. I've seen few people use it and credit you.. yet you don't have the icon listed here in your creations, so I decided to ask if it's okay for me to use that particular icon? Naturally I'll credit it to you, but if you want to limit the use of the icon it's totally okay and I'll remove it from my icons. ^^

*Edit. LJ is grumpy at me. *weeps*

Edited 2008-10-03 17:24 (UTC)

Sure no problem! Actually...because I've been so busy with classes, I've forgotten to post any of my more recent icons (i.e. within the last three-four months) into the icon post. ^_^;;

Unless an icon has been specifically stated for no use (and those I DO make sure to mention whenever I can), then there's no problem with you using it.

I really should update my icons post...~~(and maybe getting around to making those dancing Yuuri and Murata icons).~~

Just wanted to wish you a Happy Birthday. =) <3

^_^ Thank you very much! ♥ *hugs*

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Icon Post #2 (Mass Update 10/3/08)

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