My banners and icons for Slayerstillness #44 (plus icons from Round 42 and geeky-thoughts)

[red_satin_doll]

But first, I want to take a moment to wish HAPPY BIRTHMONTH to m'lady snogged: funny, kind-hearted, generous with her time and support and oh-so-talented. I was stumped as to what to do for a birthday present this year but velvetwhip gifted her with a fantastic Riley, Willow S4 drabble "Not So NIce Guy" that really packs a wallop (or at least a very strong "ouch") in just a few short lines. Check it out. (And yes, I happen to ship Riley/Willow. Didn't everyone when they first watched S4?)

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Now, onto today's feature: THANK YOU again to everyone who voted in slayerstillness Challenge 44, and most especially to everyone who honored my icons with 2nd Place, Best Crop and - drumroll, please - my very first Best Color honor! Congratulations again to the other winners tempertemper, first-time entrant muirthemne, sweet_lyri, and my Banner Maker's Choice teragramm. See all the winning icons and banners here.

Full disclosure: I was rooting for TT's Drusilla icon in the tiebreaker voting. More Dru icons are a needful thing and I love the meta-ness of the starlight texture - with Dru it's not just a pretty background - as well as the softness and coloring. But there were so many great icons that choosing was once again incredibly difficult. As happens so often, I noticed a consistency to the entries across the board, regardless of who made them. This time it was in terms of color choices, with cream/ecru, orange, green, and faded blue-grey predominating with touches of deep pink. So for the banner, I adapted a photograph I snapped in my front yard a couple of days ago to coordinate. Original photo behind cut, along with banners, entries and alt icons from rounds 42 and 44.

Teasers:      

     

Banners and icons by your's truly; Art Nouveau Caps font from dafont.com; art nouveau frame from a design by riccus on deviantart.com.

My entries for Round 44:

1. 2. 3. 4.  5.

If 2 and 5 look familiar, they should. I couldn't resist returning to that photo to play with it again. I still don't know who the original photographer was, alas; if anyone has the inside scoop on that, please let me know. Let's pretend that I did not look at #5 when I finished it and think to myself, If I can't win Best Color with that, then I never will. Nope, such impure thoughts never entered my mind. And by the way, that bridge in Brooklyn can be yours with a low down payment and 0% financing.....

My entries for Round 42, which I forgot to post previously, including Mod's Choice Winner #6:

6.  7. 8.

Alts/extras:

9. 10.  11.   12. 13.


   14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

18.  19.  20. 21. 22.

I don't personalize my own icons very often so I wanted to give it a try. The "Shanghai" font in #16 is from ipiccy; Art Nouveau Caps in 18 - 22 is from dafont.com.

There were alt versions of #4, involving the First Slayer seeming to creep up on Willow...and I deleted those. There is no way to use an image as problematic and unintentionally racist as the First Slayer (aka "The Magical Negro") and not be part of the very problem I decry unless I use the image specifically to highlight how troublesome it is. And my icons weren't doing that; they just had a mildly creepy-erotic vibe so I chucked them. Not that focusing on the mighty-white Buffyverse and making caps of white folks and focusing on their beauty to the exclusion of the majority of the world's population isn't a whole heapin' helping of problematic in and of itself. But I digress.

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The geek-y, tech-y portion of the program: I took some snaps of the azaleas in my front yard the other day with my Nikon Coolpix 300 on the "Food" setting. I added glow, brightness and ambrotype filters and yadda yadda (I don't write this stuff down, are you kidding?) as well as several textures including a bokeh-look effect from Graphic Stock and the photo on the right. I pointed my camera at the trees outside my bedroom door and shook it while I snapped the picture. Does double-duty as a blur and/or brushstroke texture! You're welcome.

Photographs by your's truly, 2015 - and did you know that work can be copyrighted pseudonymously? Nifty, huh?

These banners presented a couple of very challenging problems for me: adapting the frame image to get the colors and transparency I wanted; and adding a font from a source outside of ipiccy. One if ipiccy's biggest drawbacks for me is the severely limited range of font options. I typed the text I wanted in a Pages doc using the one art nouveau style font I had on my Mac hardrrive; the font color was an educated guess on my part while I literally eyeballed the banner image. I converted the Pages doc to a pdf, which in turn had to be converted to a PNG file so I could work with it as a layers in ipiccy. Then I cropped every individual line or text element of the PNG, including the "RSD" stamp, to create several separate PNG's that I could manipulate freely in Layer Mode. For instance, the last line "Challenge 44" and the date, is actually two separate layers. The "multiply" filter to darkened the font slightly, with further small adjustments to saturation, brightness etc.

Every time I needed to add a new word of text that I'd forgotten the first time, I had to go back to the Pages file, save the changes, then override both the pdf and the PNG files. This was after I gave up trying to add the text directly using PS Elements 12. (For the record, I did try. Someday I'll know what I'm doing.) If I hadn't been at home sick from work for a few days I would have gone the path of least resistance and made do with a preset ipiccy font. Yay for downtime.

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Many many thanks of gratitude and praise to my lovely Muse, velvetwhip, for whom no query is to tedious ( "Is the text legible? Is the design cluttered? Is this any good, even?" ) or beneath her consideration. She's been utterly invaluable to me as a working partner and as a friend  - feedback, conversation, inspiration - even if and when I don't show her what I'm working on.  As it happens, we've recently had conversations about our shared taste for late 19th - early 20th century graphic arts and design (arts and crafts, art nouveau, art deco), as well as silent and early Hollywood cinema; I'm sure those conversations were indirect inspirations for the design of both the banner and the Best Color icon.

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And now a final word from our sponsors: Deadline to enter Challenge 45 "Potentials" is Friday May 29th at your timezone. And today is your last day to cast tiebreaker votes for five categories at btvsats20in20 Round 9.

Comments

Re: Part 2 - please read part 1 first!

[rbfvid.livejournal.com]

Oh, huge thanks, I couldn't wish for a better reply, you are amazing! (Imo, it's worth being published as a separate meta post.)
The thing with First Slayer's voice never even occured to me. (Probably because I perceived her not as a separate character, but as a figment of Buffy's imagination. Like - it's not how First Slayer really looked\talked, but how Buffy visualised her. I found weird that Buffy gave her Tara's voice, and never really knew what to think of it...)

And I couldn't agree more about lack of POC in Sunnydale. Even from my corner of Europe it looked strange (considering that I watched Buffy after Veronica Mars).
Yes, writers are not intentionally racist, and they don't killing non-white\non-straight characters out of direct prejudice. It's supernatural show, people get killed left and right as a genre requirement.
The issue is that non-white\non-straight people don't recieve the roles, that would grant them solid chance to survive.

Re: Part 2 - please read part 1 first!

[red-satin-doll.livejournal.com]

You're very welcome! I worried I came off as brusque somehow, I'm very glad I struck the right tone.

And I have been wanting to post these ideas for a while - I have mentioned them in another post (and I recall arguing with someone on the subject who I think was simply determined to be argumentative) and my very first icontest entries - to Otherworldlyrics - included icon an icon of Nikki lying dead in Fool For Love because I wanted to make a point about how POC's were erased from the narrative. But I never really did anything "formal" beyond that. But a meta post would not be a bad idea.

I haven't seen Veronica Mars yet, is it any different to btvs in it's portrayal of diversity? I find American TV to be well night awful, even now.

It's supernatural show, people get killed left and right as a genre requirement. The issue is that non-white\non-straight people don't recieve the roles, that would grant them solid chance to survive.

YES.

There's also two other issues, IMO: 1) that the writers are claiming to be "enlightened" (liberal) which means, they do not wish to be identified as racist. In order not to be called racist, you need to educated yourself, not make dumb mistakes of the sort the writers of btvs made repeatedly. (And Joss wrote Restless, let's not forget. His show, his responsibility.)

So the sort of tropes I've been talking about are all the more egregious because their designed for the psychological comfort of the white middle class writers and largely white middle class audiences they assume are watching. Which leads to and intersects with the next issue:

2) It's not that a character dies (this is a freakin' violent show as you point out) in and of itself that is bad; it's the how and why that matter. It's the pile-on of errors and unexamined biases as reflected in the writing. It's the patterns that are reflected in the larger culture, that the writers have learned and unknowingly fail to examine.

Re: Part 2 - please read part 1 first!

[velvetwhip.livejournal.com]

This. Every word of it.


Gabrielle

Re: Part 2 - please read part 1 first!

[red-satin-doll.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I wish it weren't true at all.

BTW, have you seen this website, Without Sanctuary? It's a collection of photographs of lynchings, many of which were sold as postcards, ranging from 1900 to 1960, that was published in book form. Truly horrific
http://withoutsanctuary.org/main.html

(The fact that I do not have ONE single user pic out of 110 of a POC is not lost on me btw.)

Re: Part 2 - please read part 1 first!

[rbfvid.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen Veronica Mars yet, is it any different to btvs in it's portrayal of diversity?
It's much better than Buffy in this particular aspect. Two of the main cast characers are POC (one - herione's best frend, the other - her antagonist\reluctant ally), and from my point of view VM world at least felt like USA (when Buffy's world felt like some generic fantasy town).

Re: Part 2 - please read part 1 first!

[red-satin-doll.livejournal.com]

one - heroine's best friend

Unfortunately, that's a bit of a trope right there - the "best friend" who is somehow Other (black/ gay/ etc) to prove that not only the white protagonist but the white writers/creators are "not racist" and often in contrast to other characters on the show.

But other folks have rec'd the show to me so I'm certainly willing to watch the program.

Buffy's world felt like some generic fantasy town

It occurs to me that BtVS is a total fantasy (vampires, anyone? And "Pretty blond former cheerleader and ex-mean girl befriends two of the "outcasts" near the bottom of the social ladder" is probably the biggest fantasy in the show *lol*) But the show's attempts demonstrate that there was some awareness on the part of the writers but the evidence of the show itself proves there wasn't enough awareness.

BTW, I need to make a correction, thanks to velvetwhip: the name of the boy was EMMETT TILL (not Everett) and he was 14 years old. I failed to check the facts in my haste, which is in and of itself an act of erasure. I apologize for that.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/filmmore/index.html