Icons for fandom20in20: Round Four

[night_ink]

[20] Magic Knight Rayearth (Ferio)
[1] Alternate (Ferio)

Teasers:



THEMES

NC-1701	Engineers	Starfleet	The Captain	Final Frontier
Punch it!	McCoy	Spock	Kobayashi Maru	Communications

CATEGORY - The Enterprise

Category #1	Category #2	Category #3	Category #4	Category #5

ARTIST'S CHOICE

Artist's Choice #1	Artist's Choice #2	Artist's Choice #3	Artist's Choice #4	Artist's Choice #5

Alternates

Alternate Artist's Choice #1

- Icons were made for round four at fandom20in20.
- Comments are welcome, as well as concrit. I am a beginner at making icons and this is my first big set.
- If taking any, please comment and definitely credit.
- Credit goes to either birgitriddle or night_ink (on LJ, credit birgitriddle)
- Textless icons aren't bases.
- Don't hotlink.
- Resource post can be found here.

Comments

[vane_nt]

Ferio! *___* It's such a joy to see so many icons featuring this character! ♥

[birgitriddle]

I have no idea what pushed me to claim him for this challenge, but at least I've made one person happy. :)

(Oh, yeah, I chose him because he's awesome, obviously - he only appears in five episodes of the first season though and that's all I had to work with other than the little in the way of scans I could find online. It was still hard to cap the episodes though.)

[stripped]

The blurring in Punch It is lovely, and I adore Communications. I don't know the character, but I still totally hear a voice in that way that the voice actors seem to have of implying the ?!?! in words alone. :)

[birgitriddle]

Thanks for the compliments. :)

The funny thing is that the blur was already in the cap that I used. I just happened to crop it so that it would look good. ^^; But I guess cropping is important anyways.

I was tempted to use the actual word "arashi?" that he was saying in the show, but then the icon wouldn't make sense. So I picked the more commonly known "nani?". XD

(He's asking basically what a storm is because he's from a world that always had fair weather.)

[stripped]

The crop is always important. :) Composition is half of art, after all!

Nani was a good choice, since most people who are familiar with anime (even if not familiar with the particular show) are used to the word, as well as the tone used. The icon really works.

[birgitriddle]

Yeah, I'm already really familiar with the importance of composition in photography (I sometimes crop my photos to work with their composition). Speaking of, I need to get back to taking pictures.

Nani is a good word - "what" is one of the most important words one can learn in a language, especially when you're a beginner.

[amethystfirefly]

Wow. I really like these!

[birgitriddle]

Thanks.

[turlough]

I really like Spock and AC # 1, such nice colouring.

[birgitriddle]

Thanks. I really liked AC #1 too.

And omg, Samurai Troopers icon. I love that show.

[turlough]

YST is the only anime that's ever really hooked me. I've no idea why but it did and I still rewatch the whole series regularly.

[birgitriddle]

I have most of the series on DVD, but I'm missing two of the DVDs and unfortunately some of my favorite episodes are on those missing DVDs. I wish they weren't out of print. :/ Never got a chance to see the OVAs either.

But yes, that anime has had some hand in inspiring the appearance of one of my original characters, so it has a lot of importance to me personally. :)

[lyd]

congrats on finishing! I'm sorry it took so long to answer, I only had enough time to accept it this morning but then I had to rush out.

I think you filled quite good the captain, punch it & KM! so YAY for the fact that any doubt you had on them ended up in such wonderful icons =D I also liked communications and starfleet but I've got to comment on the final frontier, I didn't think of that when suggesting the theme but it's really eye-catching! Although my favourite has to be Spock, IDK why the composition and colouring of that icon just strikes me as perfect.

I've no idea about this show & thus the character but the category set has me thinking that the character at least is the most adorable thing ever just by existing XD. May I ask what his hair colour is? In some of your icons it looks green and in the others more teal like but it all might be due to lights/shadows in those scenes so I wonder /curious.

[birgitriddle]

No problem with taking your time to comment. :)

I'm actually not quite sure where I got the idea for my Final Frontier icon, but I was trying to figure out what would help increase the focus on the figure and somehow also use the huge negative space left in a way that wouldn't take the focus away. So I'm glad worked.

I think with Spock, there was some kind of fortunate accident with the texture I used that makes it seem like his hair continues behind the texture and fades off a bit. Yet it's also clear that it's separate.

He is rather lovable and adorable in the anime. He clearly cares for Fuu (the main character whom he falls in love with) and he just has a interesting personality that ranges from silly to serious. I'm glad the category set got across how adorable he can be. XD It's why I love him after all.

And his hair is green. I think the teal you're seeing is due to the lights and shadows and maybe some of the textures I've used, like in the Spock icon. The cap for Starfleet was from a scene that took place at night-time and so that probably affected his hair color.

[lyd]

fortunate accident = best kind of icons =D

*nods* I figured one had to be the 'true' color but I wasn't sure which it was XD

[birgitriddle]

I suspect many good things happen because of fortunate accidents. ;)

[pureevil230]

I don't know the anime or the character but he looks pretty cool thanx to your icons. they look awesome for a beginner. hope you had fun on the 20in20 challenge, i know i did. did you find it challenging at times? like it tested your creativity but in a good way? pushing at your creative limits to play around with things.

[birgitriddle]

I had fun, though I was having a bit of an obsession with making icons at the time, hence why it was finished so early.

(I'm making icons for a Sailor Moon fan community challenge at this moment actually.)

It was challenging, but educational. It was the Artist's Choice icons that I first started to make, then the category and then the themes. You can tell the progression of improvement if you know that.

I learned a lot about the program I was using, how to use layers, manipulating text and I utilized several tutorials I found for the program I use, GIMP. And yeah, I had to be creative with several of the icons such as Engineer, Final Frontier, and Spock. Spock was a lovely surprise in the end. :) A lot of it was just playing around and seeing what worked best and using the undo history a lot.

Oh and I'm sorta a beginner and sorta not. In the program I used to use (which I no longer have access to, plus it didn't have the capacity to do layers), I pretty much learned how to do effective cropping and adding one pixel borders to my icons. I did have to learn a new way of adding the one pixel borders for GIMP, but that I figured out while making this set. The icon I used for this comment is one of my early icons made out of a stock image. I didn't really do anything fancy with it. Just cropping and putting the one pixel border on it.

[kiokushitaka]

AC1 and its variant are very nicely executed. I also really like Spock. :)

[birgitriddle]

Thanks. :)

AC1 was actually the first one made. It's weird how good it came out. It's one of my favorites too.

[birgitriddle]

Oh and feel free to do any general crit if you want to even if you don't know how to give specific directions for my program. :)

[vangirl]

This is actually a very nice batch for a beginner! :O Spock turned out especially well too!

I don't know much about GIMP so I can't give you any specifics, but I noticed you were open for concrit so, I might have some general things that could help?

One big thing that might help is trying to save in .png if you can. I noticed that .jpg tends to get pixelated more often, sometimes even if you set the quality as high as can be. If you can't save as .png or if you find that it makes your browser go bleh, don't worry about that. Just try to save as the highest quality .jpg if you can. :>

Another thing I've noticed is that several of your icons seem a tad bit faded, or even 'flat'; Category #1 especially. Does GIMP have an brightness/contrast tool at all? I use Photoshop Elements and I found that adjusting the contrast can help a lot in making colors stand out if I'm working with a low quality image. :>

Oh! Also on the low quality image front, it might help to play around with sharpen and blur tools. Some icons look a bit too sharp and others seem bit blurred but figuring out how to use those tools can help when you're working with an image that's a bit too much in either direction.

Overall though, I think you have a really good eye for composition and color is used quite effectively. (Spock especially stands out in both categories!) I think if you continue to play around with your program and experiment with all the different settings, you'll be able to make a lot of cool icons. :>

[birgitriddle]

Actually, I started saving them as .png halfway through this set when I noticed that the text looked horrible if I saved Engineer as a .jpg. All of the themes icons except the first one are .png while the rest are .jpg (order of making = Artist's choice, Category, Themes - I actually think Spock may have been made last).

I think I've discovered the brightness/contrast tool as I worked on this set of Sailor Moon icons that I've just posted. Some of those icons I feel bleh on, but I'm pleased with several of them. I haven't started to work with the sharpen or blur stuff because...I dunno, I think I'm just kinda playing around at the moment trying to understand how to make things work.

Thanks for the compliments though - a lot of people seem to like Spock! And I'm a beginner in the sense that I'm starting to go beyond just cropping, putting a one pixel border around the icon and maybe slapping on text as well as sharing the icons I make with others instead of just making them for personal use.