Icons #9—a batch of 25

[flowsoffire]

As promised, here's the icon batch! Part 2 of 3 of my battle with the lovely universaldogma ;) 24 of series 7, plus one Clara icon from the s8 trailer because too pretty—and I love the darker, more adult look of Clara on some parts. Claraaaaa.

I feel the need to apologize for #15 because I tried to make a complex icon, and I guess one must start somewhere. XD Besides, yeah. Enjoy! Comments are loved and treasured—do tell me your favourites, that's always interesting to know :D Credit if you take, blah blah blah. Thank you!


1-5


6-10


11-15


16-20


21-25


And one alternate:





^_^

Comments

[but_can_i_be_trusted]

You are so good at this! :D Gorgeous, all of 'em!

[flowsoffire.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much, dear! :D And ohhh, you took one! :D ♥

[but_can_i_be_trusted]

Haha, took a nice-sized handful, actually. ^.^ They were too beautiful. ♥

[flowsoffire.livejournal.com]

Ohhhhhhh :D *dances happily* ♥

[but_can_i_be_trusted]

Favorites have totally got to be #s 4, 11, 18, and 22.

[flowsoffire.livejournal.com]

Eeee, thanks, always lovely to know :) That's some I quite like, too :D

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

Gorgeous, lovie!! Oh my!!

*Happy!Squishes!*

My favs are #3 and #24...:D

♥

[flowsoffire.livejournal.com]

Hehehe, thank you! :D *hugs you happily* Glad you liked those, especially! I was quite happy with them, too :)

♥♥♥

[universaldogma.livejournal.com]

Pretty! :D I especially like #2, and the Cold War ones~ ♥ ♥

[flowsoffire.livejournal.com]

Yayyy, thank you! :D I'm glad you like #2, it's a favourite of mine too! And I had fun trying to do something a bit different with the Cold War ones because all that blue was too much blue. XD Tried exploring a bit with noise on #23, but then I backtracked a lot because I was iffy about the look of it so it probably doesn't show XD

[universaldogma.livejournal.com]

Noise is fun, but it's one of those 'in moderation' things. XD

I always like blue. It's so pretty... and an easy colour to work with.

[but_can_i_be_trusted]

Not to cut in (one of my favorite bad habits, lol), but your icon is stunning. ♥

[universaldogma.livejournal.com]

Thank you! :D

[flowsoffire.livejournal.com]

It definitely is!

Yes, I really like blue too, but Cold War is pretty much all in blue. I felt uncreative leaving things that way, so I wanted some variety :)

[universaldogma.livejournal.com]

True enough~

[luorescence.livejournal.com]

You're getting better at it :) Careful though, though of your icons pixelize (23 for example, you could try to smoothen Eleven's jaw just a little bit). Also, the text on 15 is a bit hard to read.

I really like your alternate as well as 17 and 22 :)

[flowsoffire.livejournal.com]

Thanks—for the praise as well as the advice/constructive criticism! :) I'll try to be careful with the pixelized stuff, perhaps I try to make things too sharp sometimes, and it's not always a good idea. 15 was very experimental, what with so many Claras and so many colours I had no idea what colour would be best to pick! XD

17 and 22 were amongst my favourites as well, glad you liked them :D

[luorescence.livejournal.com]

The pixelizing can be pretty tricky, sometimes you won't even see it XD It's really hard to see when there's too much/not enough sharpening/smoothing. I've got some problems with it myself.

As for Clara, you might have tried plain old white with different fonts, or multiple colors. Or on a black stripe. Or just without any text. Don't hesitate to experiment a lot :) Also, the Clara in the lower right corner is a pixel lower than the others (there's a small stripe of black on the top of her square) :P

[flowsoffire.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it is! I'll try to be careful. Thanks for pointing it out, anyway.

Yeah, good ideas :) I really wanted to explore with more complex stuff so I just went ahead and added it ;) Yes, experimenting is the way to go! Thanks for the ideas!

PASTING FAIIIIIIIIIIIILS! *_* *narrows eyes at the square* You can probably tell I was getting tired with the pasting at that point XD

[luorescence.livejournal.com]

Happens to everyone XD I'm a pro at hiding these kind of fails; it happens a lot to me since I'm always doing my icons like a few hours before the due date XD My current icon is one of these (and I'm too lazy to correct it plus, I never keep the xcf/psd so.

[flowsoffire.livejournal.com]

Hahaha, that makes me feel better about my own lazy-for-correcting (though I have less excuses because I have considerably more improving room XD). It happens a lot that I select a character/background, either to move them, try a blending thing, or just put a texture in the background, and the selection is very slightly messy and I try my best to fix it and in the end I'm like "let's hope nobody notices that" XD I only just recently figured out you can add and suppress parts to a selection after it's done, and also save it in a channel when you have to switch to another selection, and then get back to it *FACEPALM FOR SLOWNESS* People say brushes help, too, but I'm not too good with brushes :/

Oh, while I've got you knowledgeable person—I sort of wondered if it's necessary to merge every layer before you save and post your icon? Like, does it look better, or do people just do it so it feels finished? Because until the icon is posted I'm liable to tweak it until the last minute, and even afterwards I like to think I could go back to improve and adapt it, so I hardly ever merge… but would that improve quality, or not at all?

[luorescence.livejournal.com]

I shouldn't have any excuses either: I'm doing them for challenges so I should provide only quality icons (most of the time, there's only 1 to 3 I'm really satisfied with on a batch). Anyway, depending on the kind of icon you're working on, it'll be easy to hide the small mistakes/laziness. Me neither, to be honest, I've only used brushes for a couple months. Before that, it was mostly, coloring, a few textures and that was all XD But you really can do some wonders only with that, even more complexe compositions.

Nope, you don't have to merge anything before you save. When it export the icons to png, it merges the layers automatically. Doesn't improve quality. Personally, even though I don't keep the psd/xcf, I never merge mine before saving.

[flowsoffire.livejournal.com]

True, true ;P But it's not like it makes your icons low quality, just not perfect…

Coloring and textures are most of what I do, too :)

Okay, thank you! :D

[luorescence.livejournal.com]

You're kidding, some are just plain plain ugly and so ugh XD

[flowsoffire.livejournal.com]

XDDD I don't think so…? I'm no super expert, but yeah ;)

[angel1605.livejournal.com]

OMG SO PRETTY!!!!!!! (Do I send repetitive yet? ;))
My favs are 2, 12 and 19. 21 is particularly lovely too.
Where is 17 from?
Is it me, or are those a bit less colorfol than the previous batches?

[flowsoffire.livejournal.com]

Hahaha, I love your brand of repetitive!!! :D *hugs* ♥

17 is from Bells of St. John when Clara is unconscious, ten seconds from 18 actually, but since the colouring is so different and the cropping too, it probably doesn't show ;)

Mmmm, you have a point. 12 and 19 were supposed to look shinier (they did on Gimp, anyway!), but the rest is darker, especially with the choice of caps, the Manhattan ones, then the Christmas special and Cold War that all looked rather blue-ish… And these days I'm using a lot of colour effects along the lines of blue or sepia-ish, so that must play :)

[angel1605.livejournal.com]

*squishes*
The Bells of St. John is one of the eps I barely paid attention to when watching, so that must be why I didn't recognize that shot :O :P Thanks for telling me! :)
Have you figured out a way to keep the gifs shiny after exporting them from gimp? I think you said you did, with not saving it as a jeg file?

[flowsoffire.livejournal.com]

Haha, no problem! ;)

Yeah, png files sound like they'd work better and it's just as easy, so fingers crossed that it'll give better results :)