The Miscellaneous File

[JudithC]

Welcome to my gallery!  As a start, I'm going to post a bunch of stuff from my gallery over on MNI.  I've decided to group things by type, and turn it into three posts:  non-graphics, graphics, and dolls.  I've also decided to preserve the explanations that went with the pieces, to show what my thought process was at the time.  It's more space-consuming, and more time-consuming to look through, but I hope it'll also be more interesting for anybody who's curious about the journey as well as the end results.

[JudithC]

To get the things started, here's some beadwork I've done based on House colors and concepts:

Gryffindor set
Gryffindor necklace

Slytherin set
Slytherin necklace
Slytherin bracelet
Slytherin earrings

Hufflepuff set
Hufflepuff necklace
Hufflepuff earrings

Ravenclaw set
Ravenclaw necklace
Ravenclaw earrings

Also from the Harry Potter part of the program…  I’ve been making wands from branches of local white cedar.  Here’s the process.

I start out with a plain ordinary stick.  The first step is to remove the bark and sand away any irregularities or roughness.  My only woodworking tool is a knife, so all of this was done by hand.

Then came the painting.  For the House-themed wands, that involved a base coat in the main House color, followed after an overnight drying period by a design in the other color.  The final products look like this:

Slytherin – full and detail
Ravenclaw – full and detail
Hufflepuff – full and detail
Gryffindor – full and detail

I also did a couple of non-HP designs.  This one (detail) is going to be a Yule gift for the five-year-old granddaughter of my pagan friend Sorcha.  This one (detail) is still looking for a home.

Here are some pictures of another beading project, done when I was craving blue and white:  the choker, and closeups of the dangles and the clasp; the design as used for an earring and the finished earrings. 

Dangles are such a pain to do!  The thread keeps tangling when I'm bringing it back through, and it always runs out at an awkward time.  I do like the way they look when they're done, though.

This is a set that I created in honor of the goddess Hecate, who is often portrayed as exploring dark places while bearing a pair of torches.  She is also associated with the changing phases of the moon, so I put the classic triple-moon design front and center.

This is the full set.  Here is detail of the centers, to show the difference between the bracelet (top) and choker (bottom), and this is a closeup of one of the torches.  Last but not least, these are the earrings, front and back.

Sometimes the same color scheme in different stitches can give very different results. 

This is a choker I decided to make adjustable by using a cord instead of a clasp.  I was in the mood for shading, which isn't easy to do with beads.  Here is a closer look.

This set is something I made because I was lacking in pieces for larger necks.  I decided to use a fancy enough clasp for it to go in the front.

At one point I was in the mood for something bright.  This set was the result.  I ended up reducing the bracelet and using some of the materials to make this for my supervisor at volunteering for her to give a friend - a Potter fan whose favorite House was Gryffindor - as a birthday present.

Sometimes the same design can look entirely different depending on the colors and opacity of the beads.  Here's an example.

This is a choker done in translucent beads with an amber base.  Here is a closer look at the detail, and this is how it looks with light behind it.

The same design in opaque beads with a white background looks like this.  Here is some detail, including the dangling loops I decided to add.  The dangles are repeated in the earrings, to bring the set together.

This set uses the same stitch as the bright one, but more in my natural color scheme.  It's a variation on the "beginner" stitch that was the first I learned, which appears in the Hufflepuff set.

Today's addition has quite a bit of symbolism going on.  Here is the choker, and a closeup of some detail.  These are the earrings, one finished and one before I connected the edges to form a tube. 

For a while now I've felt an affinity with the goddess Hecate, as shown in a previous set.  She is associated with, among other things, night and the moon and the healing darkness.  Since then I've gotten acquainted with Asherah, the goddess associated with early Judaism.  She is considered by scholars to have been the wife of the Hebrew God before the faith became strictly monotheistic and eliminated the divine feminine.  She is associated with the sea and sunlight and all things bright.

The background stripes are blue and green for Asherah and red and black for Hecate.  The gold (sun-color) triangle of the star rests in the Asherah side of the choker and extends into the Hecate side, and the reverse is true for the silver (moon-color) triangle.  The two triangles are interlocked, as the two goddesses are for me.

Today's addition is me in a blue mood.  Here is some slightly blurry detail.

I made this set yesterday.  It's just stringing - labradorite and copper beads - and attaching a clasp, but still pretty.  Here is some blurry detail of the clasp part.

Here is another green piece, with detail.  The stitch is called chevron chain, and the accent beads are aventurine.

Since it's hot outside here, how about something icy looking?  This set was harder to make than it looks.  The way the stitch works, it has two components, core and spiral, and each addition involves one core bead and three spiral beads, and then going back through the last four core beads.  When the colors are different, it's easy to eyeball where the last four core beads are.  When the piece is all one color, completing a stitch means counting back seven beads.  Every time.  And with clear beads like these, it's more difficult than usual to see where one bead ends and the next begins.

Back in my MNI!newbie days, an assignment for a class on fairies was to create an elemental spirit, make a doll of it, and tell its story.  At that point I didn't even know what a doll was, and in any case I doubt I could have found all the details I wanted, so I did a drawing instead.  It's hard to make out, but her head and arms are supposed to be like an eagle's head and wings.  Here is her story:

I am the Guardian Spirit of Puget Sound.  Though I am connected to a body of water, my body is not made of water.  In fact, I have no permanent body at all.  Instead I am comprised of the spirits of every creature that has died in the Sound since the Great Spirit formed it, whether of earth or water or air.  Raccoon or human or horse; bait fish or dolphin or orca; gull or goose or crow; all these and more have their place in me.  My favorite form for patrolling my territory is the bald eagle, though if I appear to humans, my appearance is at least partly like theirs.

I try to be benign, and help those who depend on me.  However, when I see someone fouling my waters or disturbing fellow beings who are only trying to live in peace, I get angry.  Silly humans, see if your buildings will stand against waves striking them over and over and over!  See if your huge nets will hold an orca, or two, or three!  I can control the creatures that dwell within my reach, but I prefer to guide them, and not break their spirits even for the best of purposes.

My human neighbors along the shore sing songs of prayer and praise.  And you – the next time you cross the Sound, give me thanks, and I will ensure your safe passage.  All I ask is respect for me and mine.

This is how the beadwork on the wands came out.  It doesn't exactly excite me, but hopefully it'll appeal to somebody, and it will be priced to sell.

For today's update, here is one of my longer pieces - about 24".  It is made of crackle glass - plain color beads with little fissures inside.  If you've ever made fried marbles, they're rather like that but a lot smaller.  Here is some detail.  I'm hoping that somebody in vampire fandom will like the color scheme and feel, and go for it.

Here is another non-jewelry item I made and beaded.  I started with a plain, ordinary stick I found by the side of the road.  I cut it to the right length, removed the bark and remains of branches, sanded it, painted on the stripes at the bottom, and lacquered it.  Then came the beadwork, which was so wide that I had to do it in three pieces and then sew it together and  into place.  The colors are elemental:  green for earth, yellow(ish) for air, red for fire, and blue for water, with white for spirit in the middle of water because it appealed to me visually.

I made this set back when I was exploring all the possibility of spiral rope stitch.  Here is a closer-up of the dangly bits.  The pendant in the center is emerald obsidianite, also known as Mount St. Helens stone because it was created when the volcano erupted back in 1980.  It's one of my favorite green stones.

Here is another dangly necklace.  The main beads are mixed jaspers, put together in chevron chain stitch, the same as the blue piece a few posts ago.  I did the bracelet in spiral rope, partly just to see if I could.  I'm not entirely pleased with the way it came out, and at some point I'll probably take it apart and redo it.  If nothing else, I'd like to put it on heavier thread because of the weight of the stones.

I couldn't get a clear enough shot of this necklace to do the colors justice, and I no longer own it, so I can't try again.     It's actually a slightly brighter blue than the MNI background, with gold circled crosses.  The detail shows it a bit better.

Here is an eyeglass "chain" that I made for a friend.  I was in the mood for working with metallics, as you can see better in the detail.

I've done a couple of sets based on different color schemes to go with the points of the compass (north/south/east/west).  This is what I learned as a pagan, and this is what my reading on Native American culture, specifically Northern Cheyenne, taught me.  There is blue in the pagan one, though it's hard to see.

It's been a while since I did a beadwork update, so I thought I'd show the results of wanting to keep my fingers busy with something that didn't put a strain on my bad arm and shoulder.  This is the necklace as a whole.  This shows detail of the design and the findings I chose, but this is a lot more accurate on the colors although it's not as well focused.

Hello, poor neglected gallery.  My visual brain has been pretty much offline for the past month or so.  During that time, I started teaching myself to crochet, and I thought I'd post the two projects I've completed. 

This is my first-ever crocheting, a lap blanket for evenings when it's cool enough that I need a little something to keep me warm but not so cold that I want to wear my heavy robe.  It came out a lot bigger than I'd planned because I was a total failure when it came to eyeball-estimating how long the first row needed to be to get it to cover me plus enough so I could move around without uncovering myself.

I started this to use up some tapestry yarn that my aunt gave me.  She died in about 1980, so...  Yeah.  It was supposed to be a runner for the dining room table, but obviously I greatly overestimated how much finished work I'd get out of the yarn I had.  It's still kind of cute, though, I think.

I've been doing more crocheting.  After a couple of false starts, I finished making a runner for the dining room table.  Here it is, in its place.  This is a shot of it from the side, with other decorative stuff on it.

My latest beadwork is going straight into the "for sale" box.  There are people in the world who love pink.  I am not one of them.  Hopefully one of them will love this piece and take it off my hands.  Here is a closer look at some of the detail.

This is the set I've titled "Chaos Theory" because there's no design to it at all.  My intention was to use up beads of which I had insufficient quantity to be useful in a more organized way.  Here is a closer look at some of the detail.

A while ago when I was out walking, I found a metal circle - basically a quarter-inch strip of metal bent into a circle with the ends soldered together - about the right size for a bracelet.  So I did what any self-respecting beader would do:  I covered it with beadwork.  This is the result.  The picture doesn't really do justice to the colors, but it was the best I could manage.  When I put it up for sale, I plan to call it either "Frozen" or "Queen Elsa's Bracelet."

I've been beading again.  This is a choker based on one I saw Abby Sciuto wearing in an episode of NCIS.

[JudithC]

Here are some things I did using original photographs as bases.

Banners:

   


Sets:


                     
                     

 

 

 

 

 

   


I’ve also done a few more conventional graphics:

 








Not splendid, I know, but I’m pretty much a beginner.


I was in an Iron Man/Tony Stark mood, so I pulled one image from each of the movies where he has an important role, and this was the result.

Here's what I submitted for the first round of the "Graphics, Assemble!" contest, after I did a bit of editing based on Wah-Tah's comments.  I liked the halo effect on the original, but I figured that other people would see it as sloppy blending rather than an artistic choice, so I got rid of it.  The text is from Robert Downey Jr.'s song, "Man Like Me."  How's that for a tie-in?

And here's round two.  Note the sad eyes in the middle.   

This might be considered an outtake from the Avengers contest.  It didn't seem right to me that Nick Fury was not included, since without him there would not be an Avengers Initiative.  So here I am, giving him his props.

Here is a banner using images of Michael Fassbender playing a guy called Esmé, from a movie entitled Angel after the title character, who was anything but.  I think it gives a sense of him looking from a distance at the different stages of his life.  I'm not completely satisfied, but I doubt I'll be able to do any better.

Since it's been judged, here is my entry for the Captain America round of the contest.

Here's a bit of whimsy I call "The Two Lokis."  The cat is mine and, yes, his name is Loki - has been since I adopted him in 2003.

And here is a version with text, because I thought the two-legged Loki looked like he was trying not to sneeze.

Here's my entry for the Thor round of the contest.  The doodad in the upper right is a triquetra, a more decorative variation on the symbol that's on one side of Thor's hammer.

I was in a Tony Stark kind of mood, so I took some of the material from the blending class and put it together with what I've been doing.  This is the result.

Here's something I put together using images of Michael Fassbender playing Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre.  I was hoping to use some of the cloudy stuff I've seen a lot around here to camouflage the right-hand border between images, but I couldn't figure out how to do that with GIMP.  Any instruction would be greatly appreciated.

A couple more goodies...  This is what I made for the Hawkeye round of the Avengers contest.  I'm not a big fan of icons, but he (and Black Widow, who is the subject of the next round) wouldn't talk to me enough for me to get an idea for a banner.

And this is a signature I made last night for my friend, General Meow.  I mentioned that I'd been toying with the idea of opening a shop, so she decided to give me a "test run" at filling an order.  Such a thoughtful friend.   

Here's my first-ever entry for "Prompt is..." - Hope. Faith. Love.  In case anybody doesn't recognize it, that's Ground Zero in New York City in its current condition.

Here's my first shot at a Cloud Atlas banner.  It's too soon for the images I really want to be available, but I think these work all right.

The Avengers graphics contest ended early, so here's what I made for the last round that happened and the should-have-been-last round that didn't.  For the Black Widow, my theme was, "There's red in my ledger."  And I couldn't resist picking up on Tony Stark's calling Loki "Raindeer Games" for that graphic.  Somebody smack me if I ever again give serious consideration to using images with that much skinny stuff to blend.

Promptly presidential...

One of my roleplay characters decided that she wanted a graphic.  She's a shapeshifter, and the two animals in the banner are her two favorite forms.

The inspiration for this week's "Prompt Is..." is the Miley Cyrus song, "The Climb."  Here's what I made of it.

Here's what I did for the latest "Prompt Is..."  It's kind of a play on the concept because he too is technology, and he certainly is...  Um, yeah.

Here's a bit of strangeness I created for "Make It Match."  I can't find the rest of the original (rewritten) lyrics, but the next line was, "Blasters nipping at your nose..."  Since I first heard it in the early 1980s, it probably never got onto the internet.

This is something I put together for an A&G Lounge class.  It's my first work with textures, and it kind of amuses me. 

The goddess in the base of this graphic is Hecate, who is one of my own principle deities.  The offerings are actually in honor of her feast day on November 16, but it's the right idea for what I had in mind for the current "Prompt is..." 

I saw Red Dawn today, and this line stuck with me.

I made a couple of holiday cards that are worth posting.  The pagan one was more challenging than it might look because the wreath and pentacle were separate images, and they both had white background.  It was one of those projects that had me snatching myself bald, and nobody else will see what the big deal is.

Icons from "Make It Match."  The Hebrew just means Hanukkah.

Playing around with colors and stuff...  I'm not sure how I feel about it, since pink is a color I usually avoid.  There's a white outfit that she wears in one scene (of A Dangerous Method) that I would have preferred, but I couldn't find a shot of it online, and I didn't care enough to go back to the DVD for it.

Here's what I came up with for the very first "Prompted!"  I know it's kind of lame, but I wasn't sure what was meant by drawing inspiration from the photo.  I guess I find it easier to interpret verbal prompts.  Anyway...  The Big Pile O Armor comes from a picture I pulled from 300, and the text is from the poem "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold.

My latest roleplay character, who is a black ops assassin, demanded a graphic, and refusing could be dangerous.  So here it is.

Crap from the "Walk Through Time" contest.

This week's Prompted! has to do with what we find less than positive about this month.  A biggie for me is the amount of money people put into Christmas decorations and more presents than anybody needs when, if they took the teachings of the person the day is supposed to honor to heart, they would pay more attention to those around them who have nothing, and put more money into helping them.

I'm not sure how I feel about the woman with the presents.  On the one hand, it makes a point about buying so much that material possessions block your view, and you can't see what is going on around you.  On the other hand, even after I adjusted the colors to calm them down a bit, I'm not sure the image fits stylistically.  In some ways I prefer this version even though it's less exciting:

This week's "Prompted!" is "Apocalypse."  My husband turned me on to The Walking Dead, so I couldn't resist.  What's an apocalypse without zombies?

And in black and white, like the graphic novels…

Normally I prefer to wait until after a contest entry has been judged, to avoid several potential issues, but in this case, the due date for the round is long enough past.  This is for round 2 of "A Walk Through Time."  The theme decade is the 1980s.

Here is my entry for the first round of the "Quote That" contest.  The quote was, "They tried to tell her she would never be
As happy as a girl in a magazine; She bought it with her pay."  What I got from the quote was the impossibility of a regular person achieving the kind of happiness that the media sell her as being the way of life for celebrities.  The "wage slave" stuck in the middle of a maze of cubicles lives a colorless (black and white) life that is dominated by the glamour of the cover girl.

I was in a graphics mood but lacking inspiration, so I did the first round of "icon me this" just for fun.

And speaking of crap, here's my entry for the 1940s round of "A Walk Through Time."

This is my entry for the current prompted!  It's the first time I've ever worked with animation, and also the first time I've deliberately gone for cuteness.  It was harder to make than the results probably make it look.  The images came from a bunch of different places and had varying degrees of sharpness.  A couple of them were tinged with pink, in one case so heavily that I had to remove that puppy entirely.  And the stone that the puppies in the lower right corner are leaning on started life as the arm of a brown couch.

Here's my entry for the 1960s round of "A Walk Through Time."  Apologies to MoonyMary for causing her pain, but the war was definitely an event that helped to define the decade.

These are the Department of Mysteries icons I made for "Make It Match."  Blue, aren't they?   

The instant I saw the image we were supposed to use as inspiration for this week's prompted! my warped little mind shouted, "Morticia Addams!"  Things being as they are with the Addams Family, a dungeon seemed like the right setting for her.  I did the best I could to cut down the glare on her face, hair and shoulders, but I'm still not entirely satisfied with how she looks.  On the bright side, I got to use the radial gradient instruction I got from Marcos.  (Note to self:  If you remember to change the gradient from foreground-to-background to foreground-to-transparency right away, you'll curse yourself less.)  It's a bit hard to see because the bottom of the dungeon base was already dark, but it's there!

The decade for the last round of A Walk Through Time was the 1890s.  Because of the scarcity of live color images, I decided to take a different approach.  I love Art Nouveau, so I found a picture in that style that would serve as a setting for a scene, and then picked drawings that would fit into that scene.  This is the result.

I decided that I wanted to show MoonyMary, who ran A Walk Through Time, some special appreciation, so I made her this set.  She is a major Beatles fan, and she mentioned that John Lennon was her favorite Beatle.  I picked out one image of early Beatles, one of them later in their career, and one of John to use as centerpiece.  The background of the whole thing is Strawberry Fields, the part of New York's Central Park that was dedicated to John after he was killed.

 

The quote for the second round of "Quote That!" was:

"An' I'm gonna hold on
For the rest of my days,
'Cos I know what it means
To walk along the lonely street of dreams."

It made me think of Fantine from Les Misérables.  After the father of her child abandoned them, alone, she held onto the dream of a better life for both of them.  Even after that dream became impossible for her, she continued to pursue it for her daughter's sake.

When I saw the inspiration for this week's prompted!, my first thought was to do something romantic, like a bed all covered with rose petals, but I couldn't find the right images.  Then I latched onto the comment about the death of roses.  The two pictures of roses are of parts of the bouquet that my husband sent me for our anniversary back in October, first while it was fresh and then after I dried four of the roses.

Using the character I created for a now-defunct X-Men: First Class RP for this week's prompt put me in an Erik kind of mood, so I made me a new banner.  I could just sit here and stare at him it for a while...

I had this idea while I was watching Les Misérables with my other half.  It didn't come out quite the way I planned, but I'm reasonably pleased with it.

I was in a Michael Fassbender mood, so I made this of him as Paul from Haywire.  I'm absurdly pleased with the fact that I got his eyelashes in the picture on the right.

So there I was, innocently lurking the club for Les Misérables, when I realized that I hadn't done anything, graphics-wise, for my favorite character.  Now I have.

The inspiration for this week's prompted! spoke to me right away.  I picked up on the reference to the Limpopo River, which reminded me of this Just-So Story, with its repeated mentions of the "great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River," and its protagonist, the Elephant's Child.  So I found an appropriate picture of the Limpopo and one of a young elephant, and put the two together.  The elephant's trunk is shorter than normal because it is the "before" picture of the Elephant's Child.  The crocodile has not yet entered the picture, but trust me, O Best Beloved, he will.

I don't usually like to post contest entries before the round is judged, but it's now almost two weeks after the deadline, so I'm going to get this one out of the way.  It's for the third round of "Quote That!"

The quote is:  "A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."  The images are from Cloud Atlas.  The character, Sonmi-451, is, as her name implies, one of a series of virtually identical workers.  At night in her sleeping compartment, she dreams of a life with more to it than serving food to people who see her as an interchangeable part.  The dawn of her enlightenment comes when she gets a glimpse through the fence of the closely-guarded secret of what actually becomes of her type of worker once they have outlived their usefulness.  The road in the background divides her pre- and post-revelation selves.


At long last I can post the set I made for the (Classes) First Year Lounge holiday gift exchange.  My recipient was Lord Sevtrix, a.k.a. At.  By lurking his CoS I learned that the prevailing colors in his life are green, silver and light blue, and he plays/played for the Kenmare Kestrels.  I also know from certain comments he has made that he is not the most social of people.  So I made him this set, which features his colors and a kestrel, together with a positive quotation about being alone.  I wish I knew what he thought of it, but he never posted any kind of feedback in the gifting thread.  Or maybe that says it all.

 

Here's a sig I made for my friend Mishi (General Meow).  She provided the Bester picture.  As soon as I saw it, the quote popped into my mind.

I've made my first wallpaper!  We won't discuss how long it took to prepare all those images.  I like the result, though, and I like being able to admire Benjamin.  This is also my first thumbnail, so it was a learning experience all around.

I was in the mood for graphicking, and kind of bummed over the death of "Quote That!" so I made me this Iron Man banner.  It's rather like him bowing to himself, which makes me snicker.

Here are my entry for Brian's (bpike19) Staffer of the Two Weeks contest.  The icons are from Mysterious Cities of Gold.

 

 

More new goodies.  I hate to see an aide with nothing to wear!

 

 

 

I've been making banners for the First Year Lounge.  Here they are.

The subject of the latest course in MNI Classes is love.  One option for Muggle Studies homework was to choose a person or couple from classical mythology and make a banner portraying him/her/them.  The person I chose is Psyche. 

In a nutshell, the myth tells how she agreed to marry Eros (son of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and the god of physical love in his own right), sight unseen, with the agreement that she would never try to find out what he looked like.  Eventually her curiosity overcame her, and she sneaked a peek while he slept.  In breaking her word, she lost him.  Metaphorically, the myth has to do with how the mind can’t just accept love, but rather, it feels the need to investigate, and in the course of investigating, it can destroy or send love away. 

I chose these images because one shows the sweet, patient side of Psyche and the other shows her curiosity at work.  I picked Psyche on her own, rather than with Eros, partly because of the difficulty of finding images of the couple that are MNI-compliant and partly because I have a weakness for a woman with excessive curiosity, being one myself.

In the course of a discussion about The Hobbit, I learned that bpike19's (a.k.a. Professor Brian) favorite character is Radagast.  Since any inspiration is a good one, I made him this set.

 

Here's a bit of whimsy that I couldn't resist.  To me, Mrs. Norris and Professor McGonagall purr-sonify their concepts.

I was in an Erik mood, so I made myself some new clothes.

 

Here's what I did for the latest prompted!  I sure wish GIMP allowed for blanking out the distracting display for a transparent background.  Seeing what I was doing, particularly for the text, was a royal pain in the anatomy, and I'm still not entirely pleased with the final result.

I think I've finished poking at Jennifer.'s Staffer of the Two Weeks contest, so I might as well post what I made her.

 

 

 

 

I've been playing with some of the Centurion screen captures I did yesterday.

For almost a year now, I've been working (very part time) as a freelance editor/proofreader for a company that publishes ebooks.  More recently it occurred to me that I might be able to use my graphics skills to put together covers for their publications, so I started trying to put together a mockup of a cover for one of my own unpublished novels, thus creating a double-barreled approach to selling my work.  I have failed with the cover mockup.  So...  In the interest of having a graphic to present to the publisher in this lifetime, I've added the title of the movie to my Quintus banner and come up with this:

The character I created for a recent roleplay prompt piece doesn't have an RP to call her own.  I felt sorry for her, so I made her a banner.  Just BTW, the eyes in the picture started out brown.

I was trying to muddle through one of the tutorials for this week's prompted! and failed miserably because I'm not using the same version of GIMP.  However, I did have fun playing with layers, which is something I haven't done before, so I decided to do some of that with colors and shapes and opacities.  Here's the result so far.

More fun with shapes and colors.  I'm having a blast!  And I've barely begun to play.

To continue my playing around and give myself several topics, I decided to do a series of studies based on the elements.  Here's the first - Fire, obviously.

And here is my Air study.

Here is Earth:

And here is Water.  I wanted to do one for Spirit with a rainbow background done with square gradient like the others, but the spectrum gradients in GIMP are hideous.  Oh, well.  In any case, I have no idea what I would have done to represent Spirit.

Here's a shiny new sig.  I'm practically giddy over the transparent cat.  There's something about playing with opacity that makes me rub my hands together and giggle madly.  I'm less enthused about the text, but I wanted it all to be in two lines, and there weren't a lot of fonts that would allow for that.  I know it kind of blends into the background; that's intentional.  Oh, and yes, the cat is mine.

When I offered to make a graphic for Teresa, who works for the same ebook publisher that I do, she mentioned wanting to see Iron Man 3.  After a bit of poking around online, I found some images I liked, and made her this.

Here are two different scaled-down versions of the wallpaper I made for Sam's (potterfreak!) phone:  the original and the black-and-white variation she requested after seeing the original.  And here is the full-size original wallpaper.

I was in an Erik mood again.  How many ways can he look good?

Tonight I decided that I wanted to get a unique Iron Man/Tony Stark t-shirt made.  This is a scaled-down version of what I came up with.  The text is more... assertive than I'd normally have made it because it's intended to be read from a distance.

I made a couple of things, such as they are, for Zoe Lupin's Staffer of the Two Weeks.  Isn't it amazing what a difference a ginormous budget makes to costuming?

The current prompted! asks for icons from a movie being released in the fall, so I couldn't use Iron Man 3, which is coming out next month.  Mean ol' Marcos!     So I went for a Michael Fassbender movie that's currently in post-production, which lines it up nicely for fall release.  Too bad he has to wear that silly headgear over his face!

I was feeling iconish again, so I made this using images from Iron Man 3.  The more I see, the more psyched I am for the movie.

Here is my entry for the first round of the savant contest.  MASH is one of my all-time favorite TV shows, and it still makes me laugh (and sometimes cry) when I catch an episode or two in reruns.  I chose Hawkeye and Margaret as the subjects for my icons because they were the two main characters who survived the entire series.  The background comes from a shot that I split so "MASH" would cross the two icons, and I added a low-opacity olive-drab gradient getting darker from the inner edge out for that drab Army look.

And here's my entry for the latest prompted!  I wanted images of Morgana (from the Merlin TV series) that were neither hidden nor apologetic.  She may have reached wrong conclusions, but she had plenty of help, and she was a righteous strong woman.

Here's a set I made for Jade's Staffer of the Two Weeks contest.  I wanted to include a picture of Klinger from MASH, who was a major fan, but I couldn't find one that worked.

And I came up with a banner, too.

A new bit of fun for prompted!...

Here's my entry for round two of the savant contest.  It's amazing how different it looks on the light MNI background, as opposed to the dark MNI background.  To me the coloring was kind of a no-brainer.  "Stray Cat Strut" is an old-fashioned sounding song, and sepia was often used in old-style photography.  What I used isn't quite sepia, but it's as close as I could eyeball.

This is a scaled-down version of the wallpaper I made for Sam's (potterfreak!) phone.  Finding images that were large enough to use was an exercise in frustration, and I never did find a large enough version of the one that I wanted to put at the center.

And a couple of things for Kelly's Staffer of the Two Weeks contest:

 

 

After a week and a half of struggle, I finally came up with a concept that's big enough for an oversized banner.

It has a Pacific Northwest theme, since all the elements can be found here.  In the "nothing is ever wasted" category, the cedar tree and the ferns in the foreground are pictures that I collected for a "conceptual garden" that Ni (Niamh_Augurey) had us create for one of her Herbology classes.  Anybody else remember that?  The lynx comes from a small gallery I've put together for myself, because Lynx is of spiritual importance to me.  The other three critters are also native to this area.  As a card-carrying member of the Slug Club, I was tempted to include a picture of the Washington State bird, the banana slug, but I couldn't figure out a way to make it visible.

Here are my entries for the last two rounds of savant.  My entry for round 3 is the second-choice set that came out of having two of my icons declared non-MNI-compliant.  The goal of the coloring and borderline over-sharpening was to create a visual equivalent of the siren sound from the Alien movies.  The original, non-eviscerated set does a better job of that, and also of capturing the feel of the movie.  If anyone would like to see it, feel free to drop me an owl, and I'll send a link.

The last entry uses pictures of kids in trying circumstances.  I shifted colors toward the cool end of the spectrum and also added a low-opacity layer of pale blue for the sense of the (emotionally) cold world the kids live in.

These days the fashion around here seems to be black-and-white graphics, so I decided to try something different.  This is the first in a series of what might be considered alien landscapes.  It doesn't have as much finesse as I'd envisioned, but it's not too bad for an experiment.  Hopefully I'll get better as I work more with the general concept.

I didn't name my Albus after Dumbledore - I don't like Dumbledore - but there's no reason I can't imagine my kid with his human namesake.

This is Arafel.  Isn't she a pretty girl?  Her name means "fog" or "mist" in Hebrew.  The quote is something I've often said to her, and she usually raises a paw to me in response.

Here are a couple of things I made for the serotonin Staffer of the Two Weeks.  I'm pretty pleased with how they came out, even though I'm 99% sure I won't win a thing.  I'd almost be tempted to wear the second set myself once the contest is over, just for the quote.  It's so... me.  Maybe I'll try to figure out a different way to use it, since taking back a gift would not be nice.

 

 

Here's something else for serotonin.  The quote is from Shakespeare - A Midsummer Night's Dream, to be precise.

   

Here's something I put together for today's edition of "30 Days of Harry Potter," which asked what I thought my Patronus would be.

The lynx is my primary spirit animal, and I believe it would be my Patronus as well.  I have a general affinity for felines, and I feel particularly close to the lynx.  It is hard to capture on film because more often than not it chooses concealment over combat.  Its connection with its territory makes it hard to relocate.  In spiritual terms, it is the keeper of secrets and hidden knowledge, without necessarily feeling the urge to share that knowledge.  It is also linked to people who have great need for alone time.  It has a talent for perceiving dishonesty and hidden things in others.  In contrast with trickster spirits like Coyote, Lynx is willing and able to behave in a manner that is acceptable to society.

And here are more sets for serotonin:

 

 

Seeing Iron Man 3 again put me in the mood for making something romantic with Tony and Pepper.  I'll be wearing this set after I finish the time I committed to the Literary Festival pride set I have on now.  The background of the sig actually came from The Avengers because I couldn't find anything from IM3 that worked.  The av and sig make kind of a before/after set.

 

I made this set for scorpion's Staffer of the Two Weeks.  He expressed an interest in something Merlin but not with the "usual suspects."  This is about as different as it comes, and besides, who doesn't like dragons?  The text is a paraphrase of one of the Dragon's lines to Merlin.  I included the extra icon because baby!Aithusa was just too cute to leave out.

   

I think I'm the first kid on the block to make something from the new Lone Ranger movie.  I wanted to use a quote from the movie, but I couldn't find anything for this character online, and she doesn't say anything in the trailer.  So I went with a slightly creepy hovering mask instead.

 

For Theme Me! I decided to use Defiance, and specifically Stahma Tarr.  There is so much going on with that character, which I tried to express using opacities to show her different levels.  The most obvious to the audience is her role as the power behind the throne, manipulating situations from behind the scenes.  Then there is the regal upper class woman in the society of Defiance, which used to be St. Louis, whose most famous landmark is probably the arch.  Harder to see is the concerned, caring mother and wife.  She too is an aspect of the character, but one that Stahma largely keeps to herself because she does not want to be visibly vulnerable.

Here's something I made for prompted!  Well, actually, it was a concept I'd been playing with for a while, and it happened to fit.  We won't even discuss what a pain in the anatomy that lamp was to clean up.  It's pierced brass, and...  Just shoot me.

The is for the second round of Theme Me!  Litha - also known as Midsummer and the Summer Solstice - is a celebration of the sun and fire and all things warm and alive.  It is a personal favorite of mine because it also happens to be my birthday.  I hope that some year I'll be able to get to a (relatively) local recreation of Stonehenge, which is aligned so that on Litha the sun rises between the standing stones the same way it does at the original.

Here's a little something I made for At's Staffer contest.  The quote is from Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly.

 

So...  I was so busy making sure that I captured all of the required elements for the fourth task of the Quadwizard Tournament that I overlooked the specified dimensions.  If nothing else, that should earn me the Big Duh! award.  I'm not entirely unhappy about the screwup, though.  At the end of the day, I can't decide which version of the banner I prefer, the one for the contest:

or the original:

Both have their good points, I think.  In either case, I love the idea of Ian McKellen as Salazar Slytherin, particularly since we know what he ages into.  Oh, and the quote comes from Hitopadesa, a collection of Hindu teaching stories.

Another set for le At.  The quote is from Elizabeth Gilbert.  And there's a small inside joke:  the font I used for "backbone" is called Magneto.

 

And another At!set.  The quote is from Ayn Rand.

 

Here's something I made inspired by the prompted! prompt before the one that's up now.  I was going to submit it, but I got the idea so late that by the time I'd assembled all the components, the prompt had changed.  Oh, well.  It's not like I'm hurting for galleons.

Here's the banner I made for my shiny new CoS.  If anybody would like a view that's more up close and purrsonal, here is a larger version that doesn't have the border or the last bit of color adjustment, but otherwise is the same.

I decided at the next-to-last minute that I couldn't stand Jeff's empty Staffer of the Two Weeks thread, so I made this.  It's nothing to write home about, but it's the best I could do and still make the deadline.

 

I don't know what jogged my memory, but I found myself remembering the Dracula movie that starred Frank Langella.  There weren't a lot of pictures available online, but I found some that work together pretty well, even if the result is a bit out in daylight for the traditional Dracula.  It is overcast, at least where he is.

This is what happens when I start playing around with colors and oddities.  It isn't as well integrated as I'd like, but those critters turned out to be harder to work with than I expected.  Consider this an alien family's day at the beach.

And here is a reduced-for-MNI version of new wallpaper I made for Sam's (potterfreak!) phone.  Here is the full-size wallpaper.

Here is an icon set I made for the current prompted! because I saw Planes today.  The concept I liked best was of doing more than we were built for, so I turned it into the text.  I also did a rainbow theme, with gradients and corresponding drop shadows on the text.

I was having major graphics cravings, so I decided to do something with Pauline, my shapeshifter roleplay character.  This is her with her two favorite animal forms, puma and golden eagle.

I got so excited about seeing the trailer for The Counselor, an upcoming Michael Fassbender movie, that I decided to make something of it.  There wasn't a lot of selection for images, but I did the best I could with what I found.

Here's another Counselor banner.  It took a lot of work to make it look like it didn't take much work.   

This piece of fur is called "Firecat."  I built the background out of a couple of pictures from the California wildfires.  The cat started out white.

This is a little something I made for Steph's Staffer of the Two Weeks contest.  I get the impression that she likes strong male characters, so I included the two men who were in charge of Babylon 5 along with the station itself.

 

And then there's Star Wars.  I decided to show my age and go back to the original.  Of the good guys, Han was always my favorite.  I hope Steph likes him, too.

 

More stuff for Steff Steph.  Holy cat, that sig was hard to make!  And I almost had a nervous breakdown in the process, thanks to downloading a new font.  GIMP decided that it didn't want to start up until I restarted the whole computer, which of course seemed to take forever.  I was terrified that somehow a file that shouldn't have anything to do with the running of the computer managed to foul it up.   :O  Anyway, it's done, and in addition to having a rather odd set, I know where my fonts live and how to download more.

 

If anybody's interested, these are the bases:  1, 2, 3, 4


After almost a year of being intimidated by the concept, I'm finally getting back to trying to put images above/below each other as well as side by side.  Thanks to seeing Iron Man 3 again on Friday, I'm in Tony/Pepper mode, so I decided to run my first experiment with them.  The material available online was limited, though, and I was too lazy to go back to the DVDs.  These were the only images that worked together at all, and even they were wildly different in terms of brightness, focus, color... in short, everything that needs to go together to make a unified graphic.  I did the best I could, and I think this came out not too bad.

Here's a piece of whimsy I made this afternoon.  It's... different.  I guess it came out all right.

Last night I (finally) got inspired by fluffythedog's Staffer of the Two Weeks contest.  Here's what I came up with.  The Les Miz sig has my first experiment with drop shadows on both sides - to put the text into the colors of the French flag, in case that's not obvious.  And I think I'm in love with the font on the Batman sig.   :blush:

 


 


 


 

Here's something I discovered in my "On Hold" folder and didn't have the heart to delete.  So I added the text I'd had in mind during the original sig-making class, and here it is.  If nothing else, it shows that I have, in fact, made progress in graphics-making.

I was in the mood for icons, which is pretty unusual since I don't normally much like them, so I made these for the current prompted!

Just to be different, I decided to fill one of the one sentence memes in the library with a graphic.  The meme was:  While vacationing in France, Hermione meets a handsome stranger.  Here's how I interpreted it.  I had the hardest time putting this together, and I still think it's kind of lame.

Here's another meme fill.  The meme was:  Fred and George come across a genie while in Egypt on the Weasley family trip.  It's kind of goofy looking, but it makes me smile.

Here's new wallpaper I made for Sam's (potterfreak!) phone.  I'm really pleased with how it came out.  It's another one of those that took a lot more work than it probably looks like.  Oh, and I need to do more thumbnails so I might actually learn the syntax, instead of having to look back a bunch of pages to find one to crib from.

Another Iron Man 3 Pepper thing.  It's not at all what I'd originally had in mind, but I couldn't make peace among the images.  My intent is to show her progression through the movie, from kind and civilized through an ordeal to expressing her darker, more primitive side.

I was feeling creepy.  Or spooky.  Or both.  Anyway, this is the result.

I'm not sure what possessed me to make wallpaper right after I got two lovely ones from Alura - maybe her excellent work inspired me - but here's what I came up with.  Oh, and I reasoned my way through the syntax for the thumbnail.   :B

Here's a new flight of fancy, just because.

Tonight I made the mistake of watching the first episode of Reign, which is history according to the CW.   :X  To get the bad taste out of my brain, I made this banner, which uses images from The White Queen.  The series, which is set close in time and place to Reign, is on a channel I don't get, but someone whose opinion I respect said that it's reasonably accurate, and the costumes are certainly better.

Here's another piece of whimsy.  She started out looking like this.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time staring at these images before deciding that icons were the way to go.  I did a lot of recoloring to make peace between/among them, and I'm still not entirely pleased with how they came out, but I think this is as good as it gets.

Here is a set I made for Xandrea, who is a fellow Defiance fan.  The two ladies are her favorite characters from the show.

 

Here's an icon I made for a galleon game in Hufflepuff land.  The text came from this poem, which I remember from reading it aloud to my eighth-grade English class.  How's that for long memory? For the record, putting the glow on the cat was quite a pain in the anatomy to figure out.  It'll be much easier the next time I want to do something similar.

More Huffleween silliness.  Not my best work, but I had fun making them. Yes, that Death Star really is a carved pumpkin.

Bases:  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6


This is what I came up with to fill a one-sentence meme from Blazecall:  Dumbledore befriended a Golden Snidget instead of Fawkes.  In case anyone is interested, my bases were this and this.

I'm somewhat abashed to say that after I went out of my way to ask Jas a question about one of the categories in her Staffer of the Two Weeks contest, I completely forgot about the contest for about a week.  Well, I remembered it today, and this is what I came up with for her.

 

Here's the whimsical version of what I made yesterday.

 

One last thing for Jas's Staffer contest.  It's for one of her RP characters, a French girl who moves to London.  My intention was to show kind of a "before" and "after" picture, with the av having her in Paris and the sig showing her in London.  The color of the text is her posting color.

 

Hooray for an excuse to use a couple of the few Erik images available for X-Men Days of Future Past!  This set is for Summer's Staffer of the Two Weeks contest.  I hope I can remember what I did to produce the background because I like the effect.

 

Another set for Summer...  This version's files are too big for a set for MNI, but I'm not planning to wear it, so might as well keep it up here.

 

And, while I'm at it, some Grimm.  It's such a fun show, and it doesn't hurt that it takes place in Portland, which is local to me.

 

 

This pretty much says it all about how I've been feeling lately.

Here's my entry for the first round of Blazecall's Heroes & Villains contest.  It's a shame he didn't like it.  I'm proud of it anyway.

Here, in no particular order, is a small army of icons I made for one of Sam's (potterfreak!) RP characters.  She was looking for material for the profile, so I gave her plenty to choose from.

Tauriel from the new Hobbit movie needed to be made into a graphic.  It was a tough job, but somebody had to do it.  There may be another when I have more brain.

This is my entry for Round 2 of Heroes and Villains.  Trying to get it to be balanced was the cause of some serious teeth-grinding.

I got bored, so I made another Tauriel banner when I should really have been working on the questions for the Mystery Class.  My verbal brain doesn't want to engage at all today.  Fortunately, the visual side isn't quite so MIA.

Here's my entry for the third round of Heroes and Villains.  The spear is in a position of such prominence because even though Loki was the immediate adversary, the villains behind him were the Chitauri, the source of the spear.  The background is a tesseract effect because without the tesseract, none of the action would have happened.  And besides, it's pretty.

I decided that I wanted my own wallpaper for my computer at work, so I made myself one.  Hopefully it will (a) get through via email, since I don't know if there's any kind of attachment-trapping in place, and (b) be all right with management, since I don't know if we're supposed to be customizing our desktops.

And here is my entry for Round 4 of Heroes and Villains.  Once again I'm scratching my head about the results.  Blaze liked it a lot, and I...  Maybe I'm just seeing the flaws, like the low-res lightning, but I don't think it's good at all.  I do love the font, though - almost as much as the one I used in the Winter Soldier banner.

The wallpaper didn't work as well as I'd hoped, so I made myself another one, which I'll test when I go to work on Friday.  Meanwhile, here it is.

Here's my entry for the last round of Heroes and Villains. I won the contest by half a point!  Against actual competition!  Just the boost my morale needed on this not very nice work day.  Thanks, Blaze!

Long story short, my Vincent cat had to go to a new home.  I've been missing him terribly, so I decided to make a graphic in his honor.  And here 'tis.

I've spent a big chunk of today happily graphicking for Malipo's Staffer of the Two Weeks contest.  Here are the results:

   

 

Here's something I made for the first round of a galleon game that Blazecall is running in the Classes area.  The troll looked so pitiful in this shot!

And here's my second round entry.

And round 3...

Here's a little something I made for Arabesque's Staffer contest.

 

Here's my entry for round 4 of the Blazecall thang.

Another set for the Arabesque!Staffer contest...

 

And here's my last Staffer entry:

 

This is my entry for the last round of Blazecall's contest.

I made a Gryffindor set for Ral's Staffer contest because I like lions.

 

Here are some Gryffindor babies, also for Ral.

 

This is the banner I made for homework for the Helga Hufflepuff lesson.  It got Exceeds Expectations, which exceeds my expectations.  I no longer have a record of my bases, but I did want to mention, just because, that what Helga (a.k.a. Dame Judi Dench) is wearing started out gray and brown.  And badgers have such awesome faces.

This is what I made for Salazar Slytherin homework.  It only got Acceptable, but that doesn't surprise me.

Here are a couple of Edinburgh sets I made for Ral.  Creating the tartan text was the funnest part.  That's Royal Stewart tartan, if anybody's interested.

 

 

This is the banner I made for one part of the Rowena Ravenclaw homework I did.  I can't tell what I got for it based on the awarding, since there was only one award for both parts of the homework that I submitted.

I felt like doing some playing around, so here's a little something of my roleplay shapeshifter, Pauline, and her two favorite animal forms.

I decided that I wanted to have a t-shirt of Erik from the upcoming X-Men movie, so I put together a design.  I kept it simple so it would be plainly visible from a reasonable distance.  I did build the background, though, and did some massive color shifting on the title.  And it's Erik, so...  *rolls in tongue*

Here's a downsized version of a new wallpaper I made for Sam's (potterfreak!) new phone.

When I was image-hunting for Sam's wallpaper, I found a bunch of nice ones.  I didn't want them all to go to waste, so here's a banner that uses a couple.

Sam (potterfreak!) was on the market for some icons for a roleplay character under development, so I made these for her.  It was really hard to find decent pictures, particularly of the actress out of character, and the icons took a lot of work to make them look like they didn't need any work.

           

Maleficent was much too pretty not to graphic from.  Here's a shiny new banner.

I decided to make a little something for Hufflepuff Pride Week.  It's not very good, but here it is.

Here's what I did for a Challenge in the Hufflepuff Pride Week board game.  It's the badger saying the text, not me.   

Last week I had a job interview with someone who was a fan of Johnny Depp in general and Pirates of the Caribbean in particular.  I got bored, so I decided to make her a little something.  That may or may not have been a good idea considering that I'm not even sure I want the job.  Then again, it really shouldn't influence her decision.

I'm in the mood for graphicking but totally lacking in inspiration, so I took a spin through the contests and stumbled across the character/color one.  Here's what I made based on the first prompt. 

This is for Bellatrix and pink.  It's smaller than I would have preferred, but that's how my first choice of background image came.  I'm really pleased with how organic the graphic came out, particularly considering all the alterations and color shifting I had to do.

The Lavender/lavender graphic is done.  I'm not wildly excited about it, but it gets the job done.

Here's what I came up with for the third round of the contest I'm not in.  I wonder how I'd be doing if I were in it...

I decided to make a little something for Arabesque's Staffer contest, and here it is.

 

Here are my last two non-entries for the character/color contest.  My goal for the Voldemort graphic was to show the "before" and "after" pictures, with part of what changed him from one to t'other in between.  With Arthur, I was going for the uncharacteristic side of the character - in this case, fierce rather than parental or gently humorous.

Here's some stuff I made for Samie's Staffer contest.  Hopefully I didn't do anything goofy with backgrounds and such, since I've never seen the show.  Since I have them handy, I'm including my bases.  I'm pretty proud of how Sansa in the second sig came out, considering how the base started.

 

Bases:  1, 2, 3, 4

 

Bases:  1, 2


I decided not to let the Sansa materials I had on hand go to waste, so I made a banner.  It's kind of a companion piece for the Dany banner I made a while ago, in terms of layout and techniques I used.

More goodies for Samie - icons of Andy Lau.

I don't usually post homework stuff before it's been graded because I think that's kind of tacky.  However, it's been a month since the deadline to submit Herbology homework, so I'm going to go ahead and post mine.

Black Hellebore is used for, among other things, regulating heartbeat and treating depression. It is toxic if used incorrectly, and should never be administered without medical supervision.  The hellebore pictures are of the plant that is growing in my garden.


This update is a testament to the power of my forgettery.  I made a couple of sigs for the current round of the Summer Decathlon and then, when I was all ready to submit them, discovered that I had misremembered the required dimensions.  So...  I remade them the right way, but I like the originals so much better than the "real" ones that I've decided to post them here.  For the record, the background is the carpet in my condo, which is actually shades of orange and brown.

Here are my entries for the icon round of the Decathlon.  I made them from a photo I took in my neighborhood.

Might as well put my current set in here, since it won't be my current set forever.  I made it from the original version of a Salazar Slytherin banner I made for...  I forget which contest, and I'm too lazy to page back to remind myself. 

 

It took me a ridiculously long time to get this right.  My intention is to show the progression of Katniss as a character, leading to the resolution we see in Mockingjay.  Originally I wanted to do it as new wallpaper for my computer, but the only pictures I could find of the wedding dress transformation were too small for that to work.  So I went back to the drawing board, and this is the result.

A little something I made for the Emrys Staffer contest.

 

Bases:  1, 2, 3


I've spent most of the day massively depressed at the closing of my condominium's pool for the season, so I thought I'd share one of the evening photos I took of poolside.  My camera is basically PHD (Push Here, Dummy), but it does have a bunch of different settings.  Once I'd figured out that I needed to rest the camera on the top bar of the fence around the pool to keep it steady, my results were a lot better, though I did pull this photo into GIMP to adjust the brightness.

On the principle, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," I've swiped borrowed images from the current round of Last Signature Maker Standing and put them together in an attempt at a blend.

Here's another blend, mostly based on images provided for the first round of that same contest.

Here's a new blend, again using LSMS images.

I need to stop starting to work on graphics after 10pm.  I was up until about 1am with this one, which is the last in the set of LSMS-based blends.  I guess after this I'll have to find my own images...

I won't be changing sets until late tonight or tomorrow, which is when I can finish off the Slug Club clown shenanigans, but I thought I'd post the new one now, while I'm thinking of it.  The image is clearly from the same timeperiod as X-Men:  Days of Future Past, though it did not appear in the movie.  The sig is one of those graphics that took an awful lot of work to look simple.

 

Yesterday I pulled a bunch of images off my Days of Future Past DVD.  Here's the first thing I made with some of them.  The text comes from the song "Get Together" by the Youngbloods.  I even got it to make the kind of a peace sign people made with their fingers.

Going back to the images I collected, here's another Days banner.  The text is from "My Rainbow Race" by Pete Seeger.

I have new wallpaper!  We won't even discuss how many times I went back to the drawing board on the layout.  What matters is that I'm happy with it now, right?  Anyway, here 'tis.

Here are the graphics I made for the recent DADA project.  The subject of the project is the goddess Hecate, who has personal significance for me.  It was really hard to find bases that would work for graphics because there was very little between ancient statues, pottery and such that was not in good condition and modern works of other people's art that I did not feel right about using.

 

This post is partly a testament to the power of my forgettery.  Sam (potterfreak!) was in the market for a new wallpaper for her phone, but I couldn't remember the dimensions.  While I was waiting for her to get back to me, I found an old wallpaper I made for her and created something using those dimensions.  What I forgot was that she'd changed phones since then.  *sigh*  The first of these graphics is the wallpaper of the correct size, and the second is the mistake (but it's still a nice graphic).

       

Sam has a new roleplay character in the works, and I made a few icons for his profile.  I would have made more except my computer is misbehaving, and crashed while I was browsing images.  Hopefully the new computer my other half bought me will be more stable.

I never thought I'd be quoting Taylor Swift lyrics, but these were just too appropriate.  For anyone who doesn't know, the person is Adalind Schade from Grimm and the other face is her in Hexenbiest form.  The background is all scenes from Portland, Oregon, where the show takes place.

Edit:  After I posted that, I remembered that I'd been planning to do something else with the text.  Here's the other one, which is more my usual style.

I decided that I wanted new wallpaper for my computer, so I made myself something green and girly.  Kinda.  For a very different definition of girly.

So...  I'm back to swiping ideas for inspiration, currently from the contest in progress.  I consider my current set a "been there, done that" for the first round.  This is my non-entry for the second round.  I'm taking shameless advantage of the fact that I'm not in the contest to use inserts I can't document (and not to use any text, which I hate doing).  All but the hawk in the forefront are inserts I created for other graphics, which I saved for occasions just like this.  I'm not sure which version of the sig I like better.  The more uniform coloring in the second gives it a kind of unity, but I rather like the greater contrast in the first.

Here's my non-entry for round 3 of the contest.  I had a lot of fun playing around with textures and stuff, including discovering some things in GIMP 2.8 that weren't in 2.6.

This is my non-entry for the last round of the contest.  It's hard to see in the sig, but I built the background I recycled from the original wallpaper out of two different images, one from a shot from the movie Prometheus (which is where the model came from) and one from a picture of the aurora borealis used at very low opacity.

This is my non-entry for the second round of the same contest.  To me the sad little cardboard bot (cardbot?) in the inspirational picture screamed, "Chappie!" and his defining moment was declaring that he was real.  So this is the result.  The design of the text comes from the title of the movie.

And for my next trick...  A picture of a girl standing in woods sent me straight to Into the Woods.  I decided to go with my favorite character, with text from the song that speaks to me the most of anything in the show.  As someone who often has unpopular opinions, I have great sympathy for her.  And it's kind of hard to see, but the texture under the text is a piece of her skirt that I manipulated.

Here's a graphic I made for the homework for Blazecall's class on reptiles.  It is a lizard that was recently discovered in Peru.  If you’d like to learn more, this is a good article.

This banner was inspired by Tomorrowland even though the quote is much older, going back to a traditional Native American story.  If nothing else, making it reminded me of why I don't like making long, skinny graphics.

Here's my entry for the first round of the "Loving Him Was Red" contest.  I'm trying something different with this contest in terms of models.  I think it only makes sense for an ailurophile like me to start out with felines!  The idea with the right-hand model was to have it less readily visible than the other - like, "oh, wait, there's a cat in there!"

Bases:  1, 2, 3

To me, a cat on the prowl has a certain air of mystery about it, and a black big cat (panther) prowling through the jungle takes that to a whole new level.


Here is my entry for the second round of "Loving Him Was Red." 

I know these icons are super simple, but that's the kind of happiness I'm trying to convey.  I've had dreams where I was flying, and those were the happiest dreams I've ever had.  It was like all my baggage got left behind, and nothing remained but me, the sky, and overwhelming joy, pure and simple.  That's what I'm trying to get across with these icons.

Bases:  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

It also turned out to be a golden opportunity for me to show what an idiot I can be.  I had all the URLs for my bases in one place, ready to be copy/pasted into my submission owl... and then I forgot to insert them.  Fortunately, Jade (rayon de lune) was super!understanding and gave me the chance to correct my omission.

By the way, it was pure chance that the piece of sky I chose to use as my background is so similar to MNI blue.  I didn't realize until I previewed my owl what a different effect that created from what I was seeing while I was assembling the set of icons.


This is my entry for the third round of the contest.  What could be more peaceful than a sleeping (or sleepy) critter?  And arctic foxes come in white, and look so sweet.  It got Judge's Choice for the round, which made me smile.

Bases:  1, 2, 3, 4, 5


Here is my entry for round 4 of the contest.  I should probably have mentioned that I built the background from plain red, using the gradient function and a sparkly brush on GIMP, and where the flowers came from I have no idea any more.  :blush:  I'm never quite sure what to do about documenting bits and pieces of things I held onto from previous collecting of materials.

To me dogs might just be the warmest-hearted creatures on earth.  This pair is also looking warm-hearted with each other.

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This is my entry for the fifth round of the contest.  My inspiration comes from the courage of the title character in the Rudyard Kipling story, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, a mongoose who defends a human family from cobras at great risk to himself.

Bases:  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6


Here is my entry for the last round of the contest.  I won!  Finding that out was just the boost to morale I needed after a rough day.

My theme is amber and anger.  We've had a terribly dry spring and summer here in the Pacific Northwest, where we are known for our forests.  We've managed to avoid large-scale forest fires - knock on wood! - but I did get to thinking about animals whose habitats are devastated by fire.  I couldn't think of a more effective image than a bear angered by fire that threatens cubs.

Bases:  1, 2, 3, 4


Here's a set I made for the right side in the current Wizarding War.  It's simple, but I think it has enough drama to get the job done.  Besides, the base images are gorgeous.

Here's another Game of Thrones "Prompt Is..." entry.  This one is of a character whose death made me cry because it was so freakin' unfair.  I'm a sucker for animals anyway, and the fact that she was only killed because people lied really bothered me.  On the bright side, the actress who played the human closest to her adopted the dog who played her in the TV series.

Bases:  1, 2, 3, 4, 5


Here's my latest "Prompt Is..." entry.  The assignment was to use at least one gradient.

I appear to still be in Game of Thrones mode.  This is Melisandre with her projected flaming skulls, an image I drew out of the books because I still haven't seen the series.  It is also gradient city.  I started out with using a vertical linear gradient for the background.  Once I had all the components in place, I used a different linear gradient coming in from the sides and down from the top.  Then I used radial gradients to soften some of the sharpness around the flames. 

Bases:  1, 2, 3, 4


Here's another "Prompt Is..." thing.  The assignment was to include two models from different bases.

Bases:  1, 2, 3


Here's my latest "Prompt Is..." entry.  The assignment was to include something nonhuman.  I went with Neytiri from Avatar, partly because the images were so doggone beautiful.

Bases:  1, 2, 3, 4


By happy coincidence, the most recent "Prompt Is..." prompt to include a superhero came at about the time I saw Batman v Superman.  I found the title guys kind of meh, but I loved this interpretation of Wonder Woman, so I made my graphic of her.

Bases:  1, 2, 3


I got inspired by the idea of featuring a single element in a graphic, so I did Earth for "Prompt Is..." and went on to Water here, using an animal I have a spiritual connection with.  There may be more elements to come if I'm moved in that direction.

This is what I came up with for Air.  Raven is also of spiritual significance to me.

Here is the representation of Earth that I did for "Prompt Is..."  Just for fun, I decided to try blending a real-life background with creatures that are... not.  I think the hardest part of the whole thing was finding dragon pictures that looked realistic enough to work.  There were some truly stunning pieces of art, but they were too obviously drawings/paintings for this purpose.

Bases:  1, 2, 3, 4


Here's another element graphic.  I know it's not natural for lynxes to be wandering around in a fire, but lynx as spirit animal is the one I associate with fire.

This is my entry for the first round of Blaze's Disney contest.  For some reason I was tickled by the idea of Wonderland crossing over into the real world even before Alice went there - because after all, surely the White Rabbit getting caught wasn't the first time any of them went above ground! - and this is the result.  I'm not at all happy with the image I used for the tea party in the distance, but after extensive searching, this was the only image that had the table facing the right direction.  Even at that, I had to perform surgery - remove a lengthwise chunk of the table - to get the perspective anything like right.

Bases: 1, 2, 3, 4


Here's my entry for the second round of Blaze's contest.  I was in a romantic mood, so I decided to go for Carl and Ellie, young and old, all caught up in each other.  It was amazingly difficult to find a clear picture of them as a young couple where they were actually interacting.  There were a couple of cute wedding pictures, but always with one or both of them with attention clearly focused on somebody outside the frame.  Very frustrating!

Bases:  1, 2, 3, 4


This turned into a double "Prompt Is..." entry because life attacked the lovely Pam.  I had expert feline assistance with Part 1.  The white cat is Albus, and the black cat is the late Zoe.  In addition to the obvious opposites of color and gender, their temperaments are also opposite.  Albus is very bouncy and playful, and Zoe was more of a lady.  I didn't think of it at the time, but the graphic also represents present and past, and living and dead, since Albus falls into the first category and Zoe the second.

Here is my interpretation of hard and soft.  I appear to be stuck in feline mode - not that that's a bad thing!  Between the fur on the kitten and the completely different "feel" of the stone cat, it was a real bear to get to look even as natural as it does.

Bases:  1,, 2

Here is my entry for the third round of the Disney contest.  This is what happens when I make a graphic while I'm so depressed I can hardly move.  Getting the horizontal text to curve turned out to be ridiculously difficult, since GIMP kept doing things I did not tell it to do and refusing to do things I did tell it to do, and as far as I could tell, it wasn't possible at all for the vertical text.  GIMP experts, feel free to share instructions if there's something I missed.  But, seriously, why does lowering the lower edge of text raise the whole text?  :?

Bases:  1, 2, 3


Here's my entry for the fourth round of the contest.  It was such a challenge graphicking based on a movie I'd never even heard of, much less seen, so all I know about it is what I got off Wikipedia.  When I was looking through images, I fell in love with the central two-shot, but I wasn't quite sure what to do with it.  (There was actually one image I liked better, of the woman in kind of a ballet pose that was amazingly graceful, particularly for animation, but it didn't fit at all with anything else, so with great reluctance I gave up on it.)  What I went for was the younger version of him thinking wistfully about his possible future, with the main graphic being his vision of it.  Or maybe looking in on his concept of the future, to fit better with the younger version being in the thought-bubble, which I did for esthetic reasons.  Because it was kind of wishful thinking, I put a "rosy glow" around the outside of the whole thing.

Bases:  1, 2, 3


This is my last entry for the contest.  There's a bunch of reasons why I thought it made sense for me to choose this character as my subject, starting out with how it appealed to my sense of humor to have one old witch graphicking another.  We crones need to stick together!  It also fits nicely with my long-standing tendency to root for the "wrong" side.  In this case, I liked the "be careful what you wish for" aspect.  Or maybe "be careful how you wish" would be a better way to put it.  Granted, she could have been more charitable in her interpretation of people's requests, but there was a teaching aspect to her, and a big part of the lesson was using specific, accurate wording.  As someone who has often been on the receiving end of ambiguous instructions, I can't help but give her a certain amount of sympathy.

Bases:  1, 2, 3, 4, 5

When I went to see X-Men Apocalypse, I regretted not having a custom t-shirt that was cool enough to wear in the high temperatures we were having then.  I've finally made the graphic to go on the shirt and put the whole thing together at Vistaprint.  I even lucked into a sale that brought the base price way down - plus using a white shirt, which is their default color, meant not getting hit with an extra charge like I did for the others, which were on black shirts.  Here are two different versions of the graphic.  The first is the original, non-shirt version.  I decided that it would be nice to try to do something to make a transition between the colors of the graphic and the white shirt, and that's the version with the border.  It looks a little strange on its own, but it works as intended on the shirt.

         

I kind of went to town with this one, which is my last “Prompt Is…” entry.  I deliberately went for lizards that would not normally be found in the same habitat, just to give it a touch of fantasy.  Somehow I misplaced the URL of one of the bases, but enough are here to give you a good idea of how much work went into this.  Another challenge was trying to get the lizards correctly in or out of focus, to match the appearance of the background.

Bases:  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

[JudithC]

Here are some dolls, most of which I did for classes, but I'll start with the three exceptions.  They come from a novel I wrote and am trying to get published.  They are Teddi, my protagonist, her friend Skiapheros, a demigod who can work with shadows, and her mother, the goddess Hecate.

   

           

 
                                                              A siren                      Penthesilia            Ronon (from Stargate)

For the last one, the assignment was to create our own Greek mythological character.  Here's the result, and her story:

Calliphonë (calli = beautiful + phonë = sound) has the black wings and head feathers of a raven or crow.  Otherwise she is a lovely, pale-skinned girl with kind blue eyes and a sad, drooping mouth.  She wears black out of respectful mourning for her victims.

When she was human, she was a sweet, happy girl who sang as she did her work.  Singing was her life and her joy, and she made it her offering in the temple of Apollo.  Then her friends persuaded her to enter a singing contest.  She put her very best efforts into it, not realizing that one of the other contestants was Apollo himself.  When the judges chose her as the winner, Apollo compelled her to sing, and keep singing until all that was left of her voice was a crow-like croak.  Her body transformed to match her voice.  Ever since then, the sound of her voice has had the power to drive people into suicidal depression.

Calliphonë’s weakness is the sweet nature she was born with, and the good intentions she has because of it.  She suffers terrible attacks of conscience when someone dies because of her, particularly if the reason she spoke to them in the first place was to try to warn them of impending danger.  Whenever her voice results in someone’s death, she wants to die herself.  Her way of cheering herself up is to sing, as best she can with her crow-like voice, which has unfortunate results if anyone is within earshot.


I kind of got carried away with the latest prompted!  The dolls are intended to be Tony Stark and Pepper Potts.  I thought they deserved a setting, so I pulled the background off the 'net, used the GIMP cartoon feature, and put them onstage.  Oh, and the only head with facial hair that I could find on the dollmaker site had the wrong color goatee, so I fixed it.

And because I'm easily amused by new skills, I made a second version.  This is my first-ever doll recoloring.

This week's prompted! is to make a Tek Tek doll based on a character from Avatar: the Last Airbender, which I've never seen.  Based on pictures I found online, I used a dollmaker to put together this interpretation of Azula:

Then, because the colors were all wrong, and the hairstyle wasn't quite right, I went to town with recoloring.  I also added a cartoon-ized fire background.  The final result is this:

This is what happens when I'm working on something I'm clueless about.  The fire should have been blue, which it now is.

I made a doll for the first time in, like, forever.  It's for the Checkpoint game starting up in the Student Lounge of the Classes forum.  She's supposed to be me, kinda, and definitely a Slytherin, so I indulged my nit-pickiness and recolored her hair clip (clips, actually, because there's a bit of a second one showing at the base of her ponytail) from gold to silver.  And because I have too much time on my hands, I recolored her hair to look more like mine.

Last night I was feeling dollish, so I did some playing around with the site that Jade linked me to when I asked her about some hair she used in one of her dolls.  I appear to be trying to find myself.  Or make myself.  Anyway, here's the result.  For the record, the skirt was originally pink, which clashes with my psyche.

This is what I made for the ugly sweater doll thing being run by Marcos.  Yes, I drew the ugliness.  The bright yellow balls are supposed to be lit up.

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In honor of the Birthday Ball, I decided to make myself a new doll.  Here are the original and edited versions.

     

While I was looking for the right components for something else, and getting very frustrated, I stumbled on a Unique dollmaker, so I decided to give it a try.  And then I decided to do something I could actually see.  I think I'm in love with dollzmania.

OK, so I found a Unique dollmaker that didn't add random crap when I went to download/save, and tried again with the Unique thang.  I think this one's a keeper.  I even did a bit of recoloring, since the shoes and the hair ties were black, and I thought they'd look better if they matched the dress.

I was in a dolly kind of mood, so I made some stuff.

So apparently I'm too lame to understand what constitutes Candy because I sent this in for the Decathlon and it didn't qualify.  But that doesn't mean I can't post it here.

These dolls represent the half-sisters, Maggie the hedge witch and Amberwine the half-faery, from the novel Song of Sorcery by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough.  The forest is a picture I took locally.

Bases:  1, 2, 3


This was my second shot at a submission for the Candy round of the Decathlon, after the first got rejected for not being properly Candy.  The characters are the same ones as in the good version.

Bases:  1, 2


These dolls are my entries for the Tek Tek round of the Decathlon.  They are intended to represent two of the main characters from C.J. Cherryh’s Faded Sun Trilogy, Melein and Niun.  I was working from my own mental images, rather than any existing artwork.  If you look very closely at their cheeks, you’ll see blue Kel scars because both characters started out in that caste.

Bases:  1, 2, 3


So I’ve joined my first doll contest ever.  It’s Blazecall’s “A Model Universe,” which has us making dolls for five of the planets in the solar system.  My enthusiasm got the better of me, and I also dolled the three planets not in the contest.  These are the “outtakes,” including some of my best work, which I’m posting here to show that my dollmaking ability isn’t as questionable as it might seem from the actual entries.

Mercury – It’s kind of a beat-up planet, so I put him in a tattered shirt.  Other than that, I did what I could to indicate the kind of color markings the base images shows.  I chose to make a TekTek doll because the planet is so small compared to the others, and the small format seemed appropriate.

Bases:  1, 2

Venus – I was going for the color scheme of the planet, but I exercised a little creative license and made the colors vertical instead of horizontal.  Her hair is blowing in the wind that Venus is known for having.

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Mars – I used pieces of the base photo to create the colors in the outfit, but before I selected the pieces, I used GIMP’s Cartoon feature to make them look less like bits of reality in an unreal doll.  Then I didn’t like the result, so I recolored the tunic to look more like the red planet.

Bases:  1, 2


I seem to be unable to stop dolling heavenly bodies.  Here is my interpretation of the Moon.  Once the Earth round of the contest is over, I may try putting the two dolls together.

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Here comes the sun - doo doo doo doo - here comes the sun, and I say...  I think I'm really out of bodies in the solar system to turn into dolls.  Unless I decide to reinstate Pluto as a planet, or something.  Anyway, here's my sun doll.

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Still in the mood for dolling...  The colors in the skirt aren't as smooth as I'd like, but I ran out of patience.

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This is my first experiment with combining components from more than one page in a dollmaker.  The wings came from a different page from the base in Dollz Mania, and started out pink.  I couldn't decide which version of the finished doll I liked better, and it doesn't cost extra to post both, so that's what I'm doing.

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This turned into a lot of work for what started out as an attack of whimsy.  Ginny Weasley is an unpopular character with a lot of people, so I decided to see how she would look in prison clothes.  I know the clothes aren't supposed to be a good fit, but the pants were ridiculously large around the upper thighs and waist, and there was enough difference in arm position between guy and gal dolls to make the top not work without editing.

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The editing on this doll is different.  I wanted to see if I could get a doll to look more like a child based on altering proportions between head and body.  I'm posting the original and the "kid" side by side for comparison.  I'd really appreciate some feedback about if the experiment was successful.  If it was, I'd be happy to share what I did.

The results for trying to reverse the process with Tektek aren't as happy because scaling up results in blur, so I didn't even try that.  I know the neck isn't right, but not having one at all with adult proportions looked absurd to me.  I'll work on that if I ever decide to try this again.  The other issue is the (lack of) arm length, which is harder to deal with.  On an adult, fingertips should reach to about mid-thigh, and these arms don't make that happen.

Here's Round 1 of the planets contest.

Neptune – Obviously I was going for the lovely blues.  It’s kind of hard to see, but the thing in the middle of his chest is the storm that is the most obvious feature in pictures.  Because Neptune is known for cloud activity, I made him surrounded by clouds.

Bases:  1, 2

For this week's RP prompt[ I created a new character.  Because I'm a masochist, and because I needed to do something to get back my joy in dolling, rather than linking to a real person to show what she looked like, I made a doll.  For the record, I'd like to smack whoever on Dollz Mania made the doctor-show page, for making the lab coats for women shorter, more form-fitting, and totally lacking in pockets.  I used a guy!coat, but that meant performing surgery on her arms, since they were posed in a way that didn't fit the coat.  I didn't know how to do freckles, particularly after the incidental changes that happened when I resized her head, so I didn't try to recreate that part.  Oh, and of course the rest of the outfit needed to be completely recolored.  Nobody makes doll components in maroon - and I don't want anyone to think I used the wrong color, so for the record, I tracked down its hex code to plug into GIMP.

It just occurred to me that because of the technique I use for reconfiguring proportions, I've started decapitating dolls.  That would be way creepy if they were physical dolls, wouldn't it?

Here's my entry for Round 2 of the planets contest.  Saturn – Again I was trying for the right color scheme.  The rings around his head were a touch of whimsy as well as getting them into the picture.

Bases:  1, 2


This is my Round 3 entry.  I guess my dollmaking just sucks, because it got criticized for something I specifically mentioned I did on purpose.

Earth – The hair and shoes represent the polar icecaps. I made her skin blue because Earth is mostly covered by water.  The greens and browns in the outfit are random because that’s the way they are on Earth.  Eyes are sometimes called windows to the soul; in this case they are windows to the core, which is molten.  The "aura" around her is supposed to represent the atmosphere.

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I'm turning into quite the idea thief!  While cruising Recent Posts, I saw a doll order with a hairstyle I liked, so I made it, theme and variation.

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I was in the mood to do something creative, but lacking in inspiration, so I headed off to doll land.  These are the results.

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Here's my Round 4 entry for the planets contest.  Jupiter – I took pieces of the real picture to color the outfit.  It’s kind of hard to see, but the famous “red eye” is on the left side of the chest where a badge might be.  Since Jupiter is known for its many moons, I put some of them around his head.

Bases:  1, 2

And here's Round 5:  Uranus – I was kind of running on fumes when it came to ideas for this one, so basically I just went for the color scheme.

Bases:  1, 2[/center]


I was between entertainments, so I did some dolling.  The second one is intended to be an old-fashioned scarlet woman.

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I'm almost at the end of my writing obligations for a little while, so I decided to celebrate with dolling.

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I surrendered to the Call of the Doll in spite of my computer's recent stability issues.  Hopefully I haven't shot myself in the foot...  Anyway, here are the results.  I couldn't decide which version of the avatar I liked better, so I'm posting both of them in the hope that seeing them in one place against the MNI blue background will help me make up my mind.

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Since making one doll didn't break my computer, I made another.  This and the previous one were my first using the full body option on eLouai.

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And now for something completely different...

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I seem to be on kind of a roll with the dolls.  Not sure why I made her blue, but I think it works.

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For a change I decided to try a guy doll.  I'm not quite so happy with this one.  The detail is all there, but some of it is hard to see because it's so dark.  Still, converting him from Gryffindor to Slytherin just seemed right, and I hate pink, so...  Yeah.

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Here's another guy doll.  I kinda went too dark on the pants, but I like the richness of the purple.  I took out some of the tiny detail because to my eye it just made the doll busy without really adding anything.

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Anybody who knows me will not be surprised that I couldn't resist the kittens.  I don't know what that thing in the girl's hand is supposed to be, but the ribbon dangling off it makes it a cat toy, by definition.

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And something frosty for the newly-cold weather around here...

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I was feeling green again, and I really love that outfit.  But I think I'm going to head back to Dollz Mania for a while.  Their poses are super limited, but they have more outfits that interest me, and I miss being able to move the clothes off the body for editing.

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More dollies!  I'd forgotten what a joy it is not to have to remove a white background from everything.  The second doll was one of those where I couldn't make up my mind which version I like best.

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I wasn't going to do any more dolling for a while, and then I fell in love with this outfit.  The change in the color scheme shouldn't surprise anybody.

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Late last night I got bored and twitchy, so I made a doll, two versions again.  I think the one with the yellow looks more showgirly, but the other is more to my actual taste.

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Last night I was bored again, and looking for dolls that would take a while, so I ended up creating bases for three and downloading them for editing all at the same time.  Here are the first two.

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And here's the third.  It's not as smooth as I might have liked, but the base wasn't exactly smooth, either.

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Back to Dollz Mania for a fire and ice couple...

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My new computer is up and running, and stable.  Hooray for being able to do graphicky things again!  I celebrated by making some dolls, since my pea brain isn't quite up to a big graphic yet.

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I'm nicking inspiration from a contest again.  From a Jo contest again, in fact.  This was inspired by the picture for the first round.  What I've gone for is the joy, and a perky person.  And balloons, which in my case have merged to form a single hot-air balloon.  (Yes, I know the relative sizes make mine aerodynamically unsound.) 

Bases:  1, 2

}What I'm not getting is why the some of the colors are rather dramatically different in the display version.  This is how it's supposed to look.   :?


The last inspirational photo for the contest really didn't inspire me, so I went kind of literal-minded with dolls.  To make up for that, I made two different but similar dolls, one in Candybar and the other in Dollz Mania, with the same wings out of Candy.  I liked the selection for the clothing better in Dollz Mania, but their wings were too puny for my taste.  As long as I was in Candybar, I put together a doll there, too.

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I needed something creative to do, so here are a couple of new dolls.  Just for fun, I did some playing around with skin color.

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I was in a dolling mood again.  I realized that I've been neglecting the guys, so here are a couple of things to fix that.

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I felt like doing something creative, and my words weren't cooperating, so I decided to make a doll.  It turned into a bit more of a project than I'd planned because of the things that had to be drawn in to complete them.

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And here's another one.  I was thinking in terms of red being the Chinese color associated with good luck, so I tried to make her kind of Chinese even though the dollmaker wasn't really set up for it.

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New doll.  To me the outfit didn't look right with such light skin, so I fixed it.

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Here's a doll I made to use as an avatar for the Halloween Ball, in both full size and av crop.

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And then there's this "just because" doll.

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I've been dolling again.  The second one...  I felt like doing something Halloweeny.  Quite a change from the base, huh?

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I got bored again, so here's another doll.  It didn't come out quite the way I envisioned, but I'm okay with it.

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I don't often make dolls intended to be a particular person, but this is kind of indulging my latest addiction:  the books that have been given the general name A Game of Thrones in their TV incarnation.  This is intended to be Arya Stark in boy's clothing with her direwolf, Nymeria.

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Here is another Game of Thrones doll - Jaime Lannister in his King's Guard whites after he lost his hand.  (Sorry if that was a spoiler for anyone.)

Base 

These are Lupin and Tonks dolls for the last "Prompt Is As Prompt Does."  With both of them, I was going for uncertain expressions on their faces, since they're both somewhat lacking in confidence.  The pose of the Tonks doll is intended to show her characteristic physical awkwardness.  The light hair in the Lupin base looked awful to me, so I tried to fix it, but it still isn't quite right.

Base           Base

Here is my latest "Prompt is" doll.  The only requirement was stripes, so I decided to see what I could do with a Unique.  If nothing else, it reminded me why I so rarely make Uniques.  The tiny "canvas" and difficulty in seeing detail on the finished product - get out your magnifying glass to see the two stripes on the handbag! - are just too frustrating.

Base   

Lookee, I made a Snape doll!  I went through all kinds of changes to get the right components, and I'm still not entirely happy with it.  The big problem I faced was that the right clothes were on Dollz Mania, but all their base people are too pretty.  So I went to eLouai to build the head, which ended up being a two-step process because the original hair had a strand down the middle of the face.  That was totally wrong for Snape.  And the head was too large for the body, so I shrank it by 10%.  Then the cape didn't look like it was actually on his shoulders, so I had the cape in one layer, copied in the main doll as another, and erased bits of hair that would reasonably have fallen behind the cape.  Whew! 

Bases:  1, 2 

This is my latest "Prompt is" entry - Bellatrix, of course.  Again I had to move an element from one dollmaker to another.  I found the right basic doll in eLouai, but their hair selection was... insufficient.  Poking around Dollz Mania gave me the right hair in the wrong color.  *sigh*  So I recolored basically everything.  I'm amused by the way the dress looks kind of like it's falling off one shoulder, like she's not tightly-wrapped enough to keep her clothes on properly.  :lol:

Bases:  1, 2 

Just for grins and chuckles, and because I had time on my hands, I decided to try recoloring a pair of dragons.  They started out like this...

...and ended up like this.

I completely forgot to move over my last "Prompt Is..." entry, so here are two at once.

This assignment was to include either a phoenix or a skull.  Since I did a skull (actually, a bunch of skulls) last time, and I'm on Team Order of the Phoenix anyway, I went for a phoenix.  It turned out to be a more complicated project that I'd planned.  I found a simple top that I thought would be good for displaying the phoenix, then added plain black pants because black goes with everything, right?  Then I realized that the phoenix was hard to see on the original color of the top, so I darkened the top.  That put a dark brown top with black pants.  Not something I'd ever do.  So I recolored the pants.  So much for the simple plan.  *sigh*

Bases:  1, 2   

The next assignment was to use a color scheme we don't normally.  I hate pink with a deep and abiding passion, so that's what I used.  In this case, I got to what I thought was the end, which was just putting components together, and it felt too simple.  Me, not edit anything?  No way!  So I made her skin pinker.

Base 

I should probably put this up in here before I forget about it.  The prompt was to have somebody holding a weapon.  The base doll looked like somebody out of science fiction, so I did what I could with his face and head to make him look like an android.  To my eye, anyway.

Base

I entered a contest, and here's my entry for the first round, which got me eliminated.

Base

The latest "Prompt Is..." assignment was to use complementary colors.  I'm not usually a big fan of them because I think they tend to shout at each other unless chosen very carefully.  However, once I got started, I went a little crazy with different combinations.  The left-most one is what I submitted.

Base               

Here's a new "Prompt Is..." thing.  The assignment was to include a floral design, and way too much of that stuff is pink-based.  I'm allergic to pink - it clashes with my psyche - so I fixed it.   

Base

The latest roleplay prompt was to create a character.  What I came up with happened to be Chinese.  Then, because I had time on my hands, I decided to make a doll of her.  It's not perfect, particularly the hair, which came out kind of flat, but it gets the point across.

Base       

[Resonance]

Whew!  You've been busy, with impressive outcomes, JudithC.

I paused the longest at http://s908.photobucket.com/user/jrconly/media/Dobbybanner_zps18c1cb3c.png.html.  Both the message -- Freedom is not free -- and the image -- a reverved-by-me character, Dobby -- arrested me.

If ever I were to bother with a signature, that is the first compelling candidate for a file to begin with that I've seen . . . which is meant as an enormous compliment of your selection and composition  (I hope it feels complimentary.)

[JudithC]

Thank you so much for the kind words!  I feel very complimented indeed.  What's in here so far represents almost four years of work and learning by trial and error, and I'm not done learning yet!  Not by any means.

[wishes]

So much loading! But totally worth it, I feel that you can see progression from top to bottom which is always amazing to see. This particular graphic made me smile, and I also really love this one because it incorporates so many important things that occurred because of the war. Absolutely love Maleficient, and this is the perhaps the most amazing banner I've ever seen of it, the thorns and moody lighting give such an amazing feel to the graphic. And my favourite beadwork would have to be this one, it's aptly named and I really admire the detail behind it.

That's all >.> I can't wait to see more!

[JudithC]

Thankee, thankee!  Yeah, it's a lot of loading, but I couldn't figure out any other reasonable way to bring over everything I didn't want to leave behind.  Hopefully once I get settled into my new job, I'll go back to having enough brain for creative work.

[Resonance]

I'm not done learning yet!  Not by any means.

. . . which suggests wisdom, Judith.  It seems, doesn't it, that in realizing how little we know (which, parodoxically seems to grow larger as we learn more) and how oft mistaken (or able to see only a small part of an "elephant") we may be, that we can become able to increase in wisdom -- not to mention technical knowlege [smile]. 

May you continue to enjoy your journey!

[JudithC]

Thanks!  Hey, my one and only New Year's resolution every year is to do or learn something new during the year.

Here is the banner I made for the Library chat thread.  I think it might have come out a bit too bright, but the judges liked it enough to give it first place in the contest, so I won't argue. 

[JudithC]

While I was looking for images from the upcoming Fantastic Beasts movie to make into wallpaper for my computer at work, I found some that I didn't use for that.  Rather than having them go to waste, I used them to make this.

[Resonance]

That's a really cool Eddy[Newt]+Niffler montage, JudithC . . . it would (hint hint, and please) be a very attractive post in the HP "Fantastic Beasts" thread.  An image can be such a pleasant respite from text.

In addition to the appealing choice and visual blending of images, I love how it subtly tells the story.  And Newt's spectacular teal coat really is, I am now noticing, a great color with browns and taupes, as your composition so ably demonstrates.

Thrilled to see such an inviting image adorning the readers nook. Warm colors and enough light to be drawn into a place of mental engagement, rather than lulled to sleep.  Thanks for sharing these, and your love of books and the wizarding world.

[JudithC]

Thanks again for the comments, and the hint.  I do plan to join in the Forgotten Beasts conversation, but when I have enough brain to converse, which is not tonight.

Here is my first entry for "Prompted."  The prompt had to do with new life.

This shows new life in two ways.  First, there's the obvious:  the pregnant woman with new life inside her.  Then, behind her, there's the arch that offers escape from a desolate world into a bright, fertile one that holds the possibility of an entirely new life for both the woman and her child.

Bases:  1, 2, 3

[JudithC]

Here is my latest entry for Prompted!  Just to be different, I decided to have some fun with dragon images from Dragon Cave.  It didn't work out as well as I'd hoped because I couldn't get them to sharpen right, and for some reason when I tried, it kept changing the colors as well as the sharpness.  Still, here's the final result.  The placement and choice of dragon poses were inspired by cats.  I love working with DC dragons because there are so many to choose from, in all different styles and color schemes, and they even come on a transparent background!

Bases:  1, 2, 3, 4, 5

[JudithC]

The latest Prompted! prompt was, "Keep calm and carry on."  What it said to me was people in professions where staying calm under extreme pressure was in the job description.  This graphic comes out of my extreme respect for firefighters, who risk their lives rescuing people from burning buildings and then trying to save the property.  They are also first responders in medical emergencies.  Both of these situations are extremely stressful, and staying calm is a must.

Bases:  1, 2, 3