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extrapenguinI participated in the icon battle (1 icon per episode) hosted by tinny; 4 rounds, all of which are still ongoing. Originally, I was going to sit on this post until round 1 of the battle was due, but since teaotter posted theirs already, I decided I might as well – additional promotion of the icon battle! Here's my offering for Round 1 (one icon per episode, episodes 1-10), in compilation image format:
I gave in to my urge to tl;dr about what I did; if you just want the pretty pictures, click here.
Note that all my prior-to-this icons were just screencaps that were edited with brightness-contrast etc if necessary (or perhaps a logo/subtitling/inauspicious sleeves or windows meticulously removed), with the end goal being something that looked exactly like a screencap. Now, however, I took the plunge of being Creative with icons, and armed with the luminosity mask tutorial and prior experience with layer masks (ah, my misspent youth making terrible graphics for online horse breeding simulators, you finally become useful), I set to work.
For episode 1, I knew exactly what cap I wanted to use, and how I wanted to use it, so I went and played with luminosity masked layers until I got the desired result. (One of the nice bits of luminosity masks is that I could just take the one that let shadows through and fill it with back to get the dramatic shadows I wanted.) Then I added the text 黑袍教授 ("Professor Black Robe") onto it, because this is the first time Shen Wei goes Envoy in Professor clothes. Of note is that I had to basically quadruple the 黑袍 textlayer to make it stand out with the same intensity as the 教授 text layer.
Once I was done being all dramatic for ep 1, I went to episode 2 and did something much less dramatic. I did some layer duplication and layer masking so that I had fully-colored Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan on their own layer, and then a desaturated everything else. The greys were too warm-looking, so I added some #9cb7bc with an Overlay layer (IIRC) at low opacity to make it cooler. #9cb7bc is my favorite image editing color. It's so useful! (It's also the color of the text in the Thus Spake Ye Zun collection!)
Episode 3, I saw this cap of mine and wanted to make a "woman is menaced by unseen thing behind her" icon. I played with the color levels etc, and added some texture behind her with GIMP's native tools (fog, lava), and ended up with a bleh icon that was completely different to what I wanted to do. I later came acrossalwaysbeenasmiler's Hades textures, added the fourth one on the second row into the background, and found myself with an excellent "woman walks away from explosion" icon! I was very satisfied by my texture find.
For episode 4's icon, a post bytinny came up, in which gradient mapping was mentioned, so I of course had to try it! This one has a bunch of layers at various opacities, plus layer masks; Zhao Yunlan is partially gradient mapped into a sepia-esque gradient, and the background is sepia'd up.
I was going through my episode 5 caps when I noticed I had one of Shen Wei taking off his glasses, so I decided to pander totrobadora and use that as a base. Settling in for the long haul, I duplicated the base layer (I always want an untouched base layer at the bottom in case of emergency, even if it doesn't contribute to the end result), layer masked Shen Wei into isolation on the working layer, and placed beneath him a layer. In way of experiment, I filled with #9cb7bc. Because I refused to believe that the icon might be done, I then putzed about trying to add text onto it – I thought "If you cut me, do I not bleed?" would fit Shen Wei's expression – but returned to the minimalistic, two-layers-only icon. The text version is available to those who may wish to use it.
Episode 6 was the one with the girl who cast no shadow, and I wanted a more team interaction shot, so I took this one where Zhao Yunlan steps on Da Qing's foot. My original intent was to make the background all the same color as the bright floor, but that didn't work, so I faffed about with gradient map layers and fog. Not entirely happy with how this one turned out.
I saw them lean close to each other, so I took the screencap! (Episode 7, Zhao Yunlan saves Shen Wei from some thugs.) My original intent was to make it all artsy, with Shen Wei in grayscale and Zhao Yunlan/the rest of the world vivid in a visual metaphor on how Shen Wei is different to the Haixingren. Alas, that didn't work at all, so I went >:( and abandoned it for a while. Then, I discovered textures, and found these opal textures also byalwaysbeenasmiler. I grabbed one, used it luminosity-masked for lights to give Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei some sparkle, and put another as the background. Suddenly, I had an icon!
My grayscale Shen Wei didn't work above, but in episode 8, I got it to work! The cap's from Shen Wei discovering Zhao Yunlan on the curbside, and I got a good crop where some of Zhao Yunlan's head was visible along with Shen Wei's face. I upped the chroma on everything, redid the chroma-upping on a "Zhao Yunlan's head" layer, added a desaturated Shen Wei layer, then slapped on some text that I felt suited Shen Wei's colossal pining towards Zhao Yunlan. (Inexplicably, I keep humming it to the tune of that one bit of What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger – You know I dream in color / Sleeping here alone – which is a damn break-up song, but brains are weird I guess.)
Episode 9 had a nice shot of Zhao Yunlan gesticulating, so I went with that one! I actually made this one last, so I looked at the big picture and decided I was missing a green icon. I originally had Zhao Yunlan in a terrible green, but that didn't work at all, so I made him yellow to go with the yellow background and orange Jeep (both done in separate layers with colorize). Then I went on a texture downloading binge to see if I could make it more interesting;jordannamorgan's Ajisai texture set had a texture with scribbly text on it, so I had to try that one out immediately. After a few layer mode choices, it was perfect! Zhao Yunlan is at the source of eldritch knowledge, utterly blasé about it. (I also like leaving some of the background visible, since unless it's The Point, I want some texture to the background, and the easiest way is to let some of the original background show through.)
I returned to the "woman is menaced by unseen thing behind her" idea for episode 10! A luminosity mask to make the lights white, some midtone and shadows color toning, and then I played around with gimp's flame tool to add the purple swirly stuff behind her. Success!
In my journey, in addition to the luminosity mask tutorial, the rest of gimp.org's photo editing tutorials should be worh a second look (esp. the B&W conversion one). Other interesting tutorials for those who wish to start into icon-making are this tutorial on making black-and-white icons, and this tutorial introduced me to doing some dodging and burning on a separate midtone gray layer set to overlay (nondestructive dodge/burning)!
I've also made other icons! I made a few for my own needs:
I had to do a whole bunch of weird shit for the Zhao Yunlan icon to make the background (with its edges and contrasts and color pops) be less in-your-face. For one, there's a layer that looks like this:
...yeah.
The Ye Zun was much simpler – I only had to edit out a distracting window from the bottom corner – and for the Shen Wei and Li Qian one, I did a bit more involved thing involving all the background desaturated, then a contrast-amped layer set to soft light above that to bring it from grayscale to pseudograys and make it look nicer. (Soft light and overlay are my favorite layer modes, currently.)
And I spotted a chiaroscuro challenge at icontalking, so I had to participate:
Ye Zun didn't quite turn out as chiaroscuro as I'd hoped, but oh well. With him and Shen Wei, I tested out layer decomposition – Shen Wei is RGB green channel, while Ye Zun's face is plain desaturate and the rest of him is RGB red. Save for the yutoudao, they're all done using a 50% gray (#808080) overlay layer on which I dodged highlights into white and burned shadows into the darkness. The yutoudao, I just desaturated and played with levels (with the yutoudao on its own layer and the background on its own) and came up with this image, which I then put into Value layer mode atop the contrast-maximized original:
I also tried desaturating Li Qian (and then making the grays cooler with an overlay layer of Thus Spake Ye Zun), but it didn't really work as well as I'd hoped:
Icon challenge
1-5
6-10
Chiaroscuro
1-5
Alts & misc
alt 1-4
misc 1-3
tinny; 4 rounds, all of which are still ongoing. Originally, I was going to sit on this post until round 1 of the battle was due, but since teaotter posted theirs already, I decided I might as well – additional promotion of the icon battle! Here's my offering for Round 1 (one icon per episode, episodes 1-10), in compilation image format:I gave in to my urge to tl;dr about what I did; if you just want the pretty pictures, click here.
Note that all my prior-to-this icons were just screencaps that were edited with brightness-contrast etc if necessary (or perhaps a logo/subtitling/inauspicious sleeves or windows meticulously removed), with the end goal being something that looked exactly like a screencap. Now, however, I took the plunge of being Creative with icons, and armed with the luminosity mask tutorial and prior experience with layer masks (ah, my misspent youth making terrible graphics for online horse breeding simulators, you finally become useful), I set to work.
For episode 1, I knew exactly what cap I wanted to use, and how I wanted to use it, so I went and played with luminosity masked layers until I got the desired result. (One of the nice bits of luminosity masks is that I could just take the one that let shadows through and fill it with back to get the dramatic shadows I wanted.) Then I added the text 黑袍教授 ("Professor Black Robe") onto it, because this is the first time Shen Wei goes Envoy in Professor clothes. Of note is that I had to basically quadruple the 黑袍 textlayer to make it stand out with the same intensity as the 教授 text layer.
Once I was done being all dramatic for ep 1, I went to episode 2 and did something much less dramatic. I did some layer duplication and layer masking so that I had fully-colored Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan on their own layer, and then a desaturated everything else. The greys were too warm-looking, so I added some #9cb7bc with an Overlay layer (IIRC) at low opacity to make it cooler. #9cb7bc is my favorite image editing color. It's so useful! (It's also the color of the text in the Thus Spake Ye Zun collection!)
Episode 3, I saw this cap of mine and wanted to make a "woman is menaced by unseen thing behind her" icon. I played with the color levels etc, and added some texture behind her with GIMP's native tools (fog, lava), and ended up with a bleh icon that was completely different to what I wanted to do. I later came across
alwaysbeenasmiler's Hades textures, added the fourth one on the second row into the background, and found myself with an excellent "woman walks away from explosion" icon! I was very satisfied by my texture find. For episode 4's icon, a post by
tinny came up, in which gradient mapping was mentioned, so I of course had to try it! This one has a bunch of layers at various opacities, plus layer masks; Zhao Yunlan is partially gradient mapped into a sepia-esque gradient, and the background is sepia'd up. I was going through my episode 5 caps when I noticed I had one of Shen Wei taking off his glasses, so I decided to pander to
trobadora and use that as a base. Settling in for the long haul, I duplicated the base layer (I always want an untouched base layer at the bottom in case of emergency, even if it doesn't contribute to the end result), layer masked Shen Wei into isolation on the working layer, and placed beneath him a layer. In way of experiment, I filled with #9cb7bc. Because I refused to believe that the icon might be done, I then putzed about trying to add text onto it – I thought "If you cut me, do I not bleed?" would fit Shen Wei's expression – but returned to the minimalistic, two-layers-only icon. The text version is available to those who may wish to use it. Episode 6 was the one with the girl who cast no shadow, and I wanted a more team interaction shot, so I took this one where Zhao Yunlan steps on Da Qing's foot. My original intent was to make the background all the same color as the bright floor, but that didn't work, so I faffed about with gradient map layers and fog. Not entirely happy with how this one turned out.
I saw them lean close to each other, so I took the screencap! (Episode 7, Zhao Yunlan saves Shen Wei from some thugs.) My original intent was to make it all artsy, with Shen Wei in grayscale and Zhao Yunlan/the rest of the world vivid in a visual metaphor on how Shen Wei is different to the Haixingren. Alas, that didn't work at all, so I went >:( and abandoned it for a while. Then, I discovered textures, and found these opal textures also by
alwaysbeenasmiler. I grabbed one, used it luminosity-masked for lights to give Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei some sparkle, and put another as the background. Suddenly, I had an icon! My grayscale Shen Wei didn't work above, but in episode 8, I got it to work! The cap's from Shen Wei discovering Zhao Yunlan on the curbside, and I got a good crop where some of Zhao Yunlan's head was visible along with Shen Wei's face. I upped the chroma on everything, redid the chroma-upping on a "Zhao Yunlan's head" layer, added a desaturated Shen Wei layer, then slapped on some text that I felt suited Shen Wei's colossal pining towards Zhao Yunlan. (Inexplicably, I keep humming it to the tune of that one bit of What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger – You know I dream in color / Sleeping here alone – which is a damn break-up song, but brains are weird I guess.)
Episode 9 had a nice shot of Zhao Yunlan gesticulating, so I went with that one! I actually made this one last, so I looked at the big picture and decided I was missing a green icon. I originally had Zhao Yunlan in a terrible green, but that didn't work at all, so I made him yellow to go with the yellow background and orange Jeep (both done in separate layers with colorize). Then I went on a texture downloading binge to see if I could make it more interesting;
jordannamorgan's Ajisai texture set had a texture with scribbly text on it, so I had to try that one out immediately. After a few layer mode choices, it was perfect! Zhao Yunlan is at the source of eldritch knowledge, utterly blasé about it. (I also like leaving some of the background visible, since unless it's The Point, I want some texture to the background, and the easiest way is to let some of the original background show through.) I returned to the "woman is menaced by unseen thing behind her" idea for episode 10! A luminosity mask to make the lights white, some midtone and shadows color toning, and then I played around with gimp's flame tool to add the purple swirly stuff behind her. Success!
In my journey, in addition to the luminosity mask tutorial, the rest of gimp.org's photo editing tutorials should be worh a second look (esp. the B&W conversion one). Other interesting tutorials for those who wish to start into icon-making are this tutorial on making black-and-white icons, and this tutorial introduced me to doing some dodging and burning on a separate midtone gray layer set to overlay (nondestructive dodge/burning)!
I've also made other icons! I made a few for my own needs:
I had to do a whole bunch of weird shit for the Zhao Yunlan icon to make the background (with its edges and contrasts and color pops) be less in-your-face. For one, there's a layer that looks like this:
...yeah.
The Ye Zun was much simpler – I only had to edit out a distracting window from the bottom corner – and for the Shen Wei and Li Qian one, I did a bit more involved thing involving all the background desaturated, then a contrast-amped layer set to soft light above that to bring it from grayscale to pseudograys and make it look nicer. (Soft light and overlay are my favorite layer modes, currently.)
And I spotted a chiaroscuro challenge at icontalking, so I had to participate:
Ye Zun didn't quite turn out as chiaroscuro as I'd hoped, but oh well. With him and Shen Wei, I tested out layer decomposition – Shen Wei is RGB green channel, while Ye Zun's face is plain desaturate and the rest of him is RGB red. Save for the yutoudao, they're all done using a 50% gray (#808080) overlay layer on which I dodged highlights into white and burned shadows into the darkness. The yutoudao, I just desaturated and played with levels (with the yutoudao on its own layer and the background on its own) and came up with this image, which I then put into Value layer mode atop the contrast-maximized original:
I also tried desaturating Li Qian (and then making the grays cooler with an overlay layer of Thus Spake Ye Zun), but it didn't really work as well as I'd hoped:
All the icons, no blather
Icon challenge
1-5 6-10Chiaroscuro
1-5Alts & misc
alt 1-4
no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 15:46 (UTC)I'm definitely taking chiaroscuro!SW because he's Just. So. Pretty.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 16:07 (UTC)Chiaroscuro Shen Wei is very pretty. It showcases his lips very nicely.
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Date: 2019-03-05 16:20 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 16:30 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 17:22 (UTC)ETA: do you happen to have a link to
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Date: 2019-03-05 17:31 (UTC)Do you mean the icon battle post? It's the first link in the post.
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Date: 2019-03-06 19:27 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-06 19:39 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-11 18:58 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-11 19:27 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 18:32 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 19:38 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 20:00 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 20:35 (UTC)Chiaroscuro is such a lovely and dramatic technique. I'll have to remember it for the next batches of icons.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-06 02:16 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-06 11:39 (UTC)Chiaroscuro is amazing and very striking, though it seems it's not one of the currently popular techniques? (Pastels and vibrant colors seem to turn up more often.) Mayhaps you will find one of them to your tastes, and I think I'll make another chiaroscuro icon or two over the course of the icon battle.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-06 20:22 (UTC)The chiaroscuro of Shen Wei looks like a painting of religious suffering- really beautiful and also augh, feels.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-06 21:25 (UTC)Indeed it does! He's very appealing, and the highlights on the rocks formed a subtle halo, even after darkening, which I quite liked. He's also very martyrlike, in a way, taking on everyone's burdens on himself, so it's apt.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-06 22:25 (UTC)The icon from ep 2 is probably my favourite. The two of them against the desaturated background just looks cool. Also love the colours for the ep 6 one.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-07 10:00 (UTC)Episode 2 is a nice one, and one of the ones I like the most from that batch. I'm actually surprised how much people like the one for ep 6, since that's the one I'm least happy with, but I suppose tastes vary!
no subject
Date: 2019-03-07 16:10 (UTC)The bold and unusual colors really work for me, and unexpectedly, I think my favorite is the chiaroscuro yutoudao. It is so bad-ass in context - and just a lovely icon!
Also, I love your phrase "colossal pining". It's so Shen Wei, poor soul - lucky for him it's reciprocated without toom much of a wait. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2019-03-07 17:33 (UTC)Yay, another fan of bold and unusual colors! A lot of the fandom's icon-making and -consumption is pastels, so it's nice to see my niche has fans. :P The yutoudao is a favorite of mine as well – I actually full-on went "wow" when I first saw the result!
Indeed – such sad pining from someone thirsty for Zhao Yunlan content! Thankfully, Zhao Yunlan likes him back. :3
no subject
Date: 2019-03-07 16:40 (UTC)and in reference to one of the other comments: there can never be too many iconmakers for a fandom. People tend to want to change their icons, and new icons will always be popular, so the more the merrier. (And I have a feeling the fandom is still growing.)
no subject
Date: 2019-03-07 18:03 (UTC)(I also decided to download more Chinese fonts. Hanyi Senty has a nice collection for free!)
Hm, true! Maybe there will be a taker for every icon. Assuming we have 500 icons, that means we need at least 5 people with paid accounts. *g*
no subject
Date: 2019-03-07 18:21 (UTC)I have a ton of tutorials by other people in my memories as well. They're all public, but sadly of course a lot of them no longer exist:
https://tinnny.livejournal.com/memories?ukw=icon%20tutorials%20(by%20other%20people)
Omg those fonts are gorgeous! Thank you so much! All the standard fonts I have suck so much! (but making a good Chinese font is a terrible amount of work, so there aren't that many.)
Assuming we have 500 icons, that means we need at least 5 people with paid accounts. *g*
LOL that's optimistic. I don't even like half the icons I make, so I'm guessing we'll always have to make about 10 times more icons than people need. That's the way it goes with art. only ten percent turns out nice. :D
no subject
Date: 2019-03-07 19:20 (UTC)There's also a website with a directory of Chinese fonts! Some are, of course, bleh, and some are only really OK for limited uses, but a lot of them are nice-looking. And all are free! (Though at least one website seems to have succumbed to link rot.)
Ah, but the ones you like the least, everyone will want to use! Such is the nature of creativity. But yes, assuming that there are 20 Guardian people, who want an average of 2 Guardian icons, we'd need 2*20*10=400 Guardian icons. And a bunch of us go way more into the icons (look at my 7 Guardian icons (and I still don't have a proper Shen Wei/weilan icon)), and we might give people an adequate number when we have 1 000 icons. Or ten thousand icons, one for each year Shen Wei slept under the earth? :P
no subject
Date: 2019-03-07 19:37 (UTC)(And those Chinese ones are huge and will probably double the loading time of everything to do with fonts, as if I had any memory to spare. /o\)
Or ten thousand icons, one for each year Shen Wei slept under the earth? :P
I'm thinking 1000 sounds realistic (I alone have made 100 or so so far, and am not about to stop), but 10000 is so much more poetic! We should totally make that our goal.
(If everyone finishes the whole battle, we'll have almost 300 icons from that alone.)
no subject
Date: 2019-03-07 21:21 (UTC)But with Linux, the amount of fonts doesn't affect OS speed! :D /takes off Linux evangelism hat
Oooooh let's make 一万 icons our goal, yes! (And then I want a Unified Icon Directory, where icons are sorted by subject and secondarily maker, and and and) The icon battle will give us over 200 icons, surely, and people will have posted at least 200 more onto the comm by that time, so we're at 400-500, after which we'll just have to ... uh, make more icon contests? "10k Icons Marathon" with a biweekly theme, whether that be a color or a character or an episode, and we continue until we have 10k? (Or until 1k. IDK.)
no subject
Date: 2019-04-23 09:40 (UTC)I just posted the 46 icons that came out of the icontalking activity to sid_guardian, and I remembered this conversation. :)
[and i know people at icontalking were most missing fandom-related icontests, so maybe we should actually create one for Guardian. Because we do have quite a few iconmakers in this fandom right now.]
no subject
Date: 2019-04-23 09:48 (UTC)Ooh, yes please! I have no idea how those really work (icontalking-style contest but limited to fandom Guardian?) but would be interested in taking a shot.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-23 09:56 (UTC)I like the mixed kinds of challenges:
My problem is that I don't have time to run another comm. But it's not actually hard, just a time commitment.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-23 14:31 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-23 14:39 (UTC)But who knows, maybe someone else wants to and has the time to spare.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-24 10:08 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-08 02:43 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-08 12:57 (UTC)#1, I had a Vision and I sure did hit it! I loved Shen Wei's "My postgrad, no touch" expression and of course had to iconize it.