My entries:
      1 - 5

  6 - 12
Yes, I duplicated a few images; you noticed? I have no idea why Starry let me get away with it, other than she was being super-generous.

This was a special challenge for me in a lot of ways. When it began, I had just lost a friend in fandom (how is neither here nor there at the moment) and I used this challenge to push myself through a period of intense grief.The person I'm speaking of had been very supportive of my artwork and so I had them in mind the entire time and kept asking myself, "What would she think? Would she approve of this?" I tried out new-to-me techniques and came out with a set of entries and alts I'm immensely proud of. (That this person had not passed away in fact is neither here nor there now.) I decided to focus on Buffy, my favorite fictional character, and dive in deep. (That this person was not a Buffy fan, making this an altogether strange "memorial" is neither here or nor there either.)

1 - 2 ) Probably the simplest icons I made that round, so the 2nd and 3rd place awards stunned me. The Dawn icon I literally threw together at the last minute because I realized I wanted to do something with Dawn in it and I liked the image. #2 is the only cap from that heartbreaking scene in Listening to Fear that I could make a decent image from. I had wanted to depict Buffy crying but had to go with this. I also had to make the scene look like daytime light in order to make it visible; the caps are incredibly dark and this is deceptively warm and sunny. But I like it that way.

3 - 4, 12) The one moment in BtVS when a character shattered the "fourth wall"; it's been done as a gimmick countless times before and since (Garry Shandling, anyone?) but this is one of the few instances I can think of when it's genuinely unsettling. The camera is uncomfortably close to Sarah's face and we are "in her space" as she calls us out on our passive complicity. As viewers we are "enjoying", are "entertained" by her pain and trauma; and unlike her friends we've been in on the secret from the beginning. I love Sarah's face as Buffy (and specifically as Buffy); and unlike so many caps for the series, this image is relatively good quality, clear and well-lit.

5) Another image that I've reused in other projects and dearly love, Buffy in her own dream at the beginning of Nightmares; I layered two photographs my sweetie took of New England sunsets over Buffy. Yes, the clouds were really that brilliant and fluffy and I only slightly adjusted the saturation.

6 - 7) These Joyce & Buffy icons were two of my favorites going into the challenge; I absolutely teared up while I making them. And made tons of alts, which were nothing more than small tweaks to coloring, sharpness etc. I made versions that included text (see alts) from The Gift, "I just wish my mom was here." What Buffy says to Giles (again) in Intervention, that she feels that being the Slayer is turning her into stone, was also on my mind. I wanted to compare/contrast Joyce who is dead, "cold as stone" but very much alive in her daughter's memory; and Buffy who is alive but feels herself to be a dead thing. Her depth of feeling indicates to me that nothing could be further from the truth but it's what she believes about herself. (I have strong words for Xander Harris and Riley Finn and their entitled manpain but I will keep them to myself at the moment. In the interest of the children.)

"Sing" on number 3 and it's alts refers both to Buffy's lament "Something to Sing About" and "Sing" written by Joe Raposo (1971) and made famous by the Carpenters, a song I grew up with thanks to Sesame Street and probably had on my CD player when I was making this set.

9) Another of my favorites, "Normal Again grune wall" is still in my userpic gallery. The look of this icon was inspired by tempertemper's 1st place Willow/Tara icon for slayerstillness Challenge 32 from Oct 2014, believe it or not. I even asked her how she got the look of the icon, attempted to duplicate it to the best of my limits and got something completely different.  I'm still really pleased by the balance of sharpness and blur and how palpable it seems: Buffy dirty hair, her gritted teeth, and tensed muscles are all very sharp, contrasted with her hand flapping impotently against her attacker. It's an incredibly sad image; that the girl who went up against Angelus ("Take all that away and what's left?" / "ME.") is reduced to this, even if it's an hallucination, and that she should find this state of affairs preferable. Of course it also speaks to Joss Whedon's fascination with tearing characters down to a state of complete powerlessness and then seeing how they react. Which he does over and over and over.....ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

11) I actually had snogged on the brain for this one, due to the rivulet of blood effect. Sarah's hair reminded me of a needle piercing her skin; the effect was surprisingly easy to create. I probably should have kept this one to myself but it was just weird enough that I decided, what the heck. It's weird. I'm weird. And that's ok. But OTOH, I thought 13 would be "too weird" to submit, although it's one of my favorites. Go figure.

And I did promise a treasure trove of alts. Challenge 37 was a special free-for-all: we were allowed to enter as many as we wanted instead of the usual five. My habit at the time had been, 5-9x the number of alts per entries needed. I entered 12. You do the math, Gentle Reader. This only represents a fraction of my alts btw. You're welcome. (And I wonder why it took me nearly a year to post these?)

13 - 19

20 - 25

  26 - 32

I might like the b/w versions better than the sepia ones. It's a toss up.

33 - 39


40 - 47

This was the round I finally got in the habit of saving icons with and without font. In case you hadn't noticed.

    3 - 7

If icon #5 reminds you of the Willow character poster I made for Ipseity by spuffy_luvr, it should. ;-)  The symbols on the left hand side are glyphs created by Laurel Cannon.

. 8


A tsunami of alts (once again, all textures except on the Joyce icons by lookslikerain). I particularly like the texture on #9 :

    9 - 11


          12 - 16


            17 - 22

      23 - 26

       27 - 32

 

I am really happy with my banners for the round however. I wasn't sure what photo to use at first but I liked this one partly because of the white light in the upper-right corner; it provided a space to fit the icons without having to take the separate step of place them in a frame of give them a shadow to make them pop.The photo was black and white and I toyed with cropping it and just letting it be, but I felt like that would almost be too derivative of tempertemper's banner. So I started adding the color, toyed with sharpening and softening filters, and the added an additional layer to the lower left side - a photograph of lights (carlights?) in the darkness I took last year, set to Lighten or Screen.


I particularly like how the Light Use banner for sweet_lyri turned out because those shades of pink and red are hard to match.  I wasn't really trying for exact matches anyway but simply to coordinate nicely. The BMC banner for teragramm was the first one I made and I was happy with it right off the bat, no need for remakes. The yellow, orange and green tone banners were much harder by comparison. The banner for everythingshiny's first place winner was probably the hardest in that regard.

      33 - 34

         

      8 -12

The Anya icon was probably the simplest icon of this set - the image was already so pretty it was just a matter of gilding the lily. The Dru icon was inspired by a conversation I had with double_dutchess the other day about how the star texture by whitebamboo in one of my IWRY alts for the last SS challenge looked like a "crown of thorns". The main image in the banners is a photo I took the other day; bright orange liliies seem very "summery" to me, and I thought that the colors would go nicely with the winning icons. Artwork by yours truly.

Alts:
   

In terms of Joyce especially this was a "transitional" round for me. Up to this point I'd not done any icons of Joyce alive successfully, only as a body, a ghost, an absence; even if she was alive, her face was out of the frame (6-10 below from Round 5.) I made one last try at the "Buffy & her dead mother" theme ("Shocking") but also two of Joyce from Blood Ties (Category 1 & AC1): alive, warm, a bit careworn and worried for her daughters. I've been wanting to for ages, inspired by debris4spike's Joyce icons that captured her elegance and beauty; but I couldn't quite "grasp" her somehow, not until this round.

   



 


 

I really hesitated about the "Shocking" icon. iconsoleander did such beautiful, heartrending iconsfor The Gift (particularly her Category set) in Round 2 last July and I still had those in mind as examples I couldn't hope to improve upon. But I also had in mind the Buffy & (dead) Joyce icons I made for Challenge 37 of slayerstillness back in December (1-5). As I recall I was mourning a friend here on LJ who I thought had died 0 then discovered they hadn't, setting off another round of mourning of a different sort.

  1 - 6


  7 - 12

I also hesitated about the Drusilla one for very different reasons. One of course is the very disturbing, phallic imagery, but also the layers of victimhood that form the subtext of this icon. This image captures, to my mind, a lot of the sickness and depravity that Dru has been both a victim and perpetrator of.Vampires are victims, are violated - with the possible exception of Ford in Lie to Me, what vampire in the Buffyverse "agreed" to be killed and turned with anything approaching full knowledge and consent? And Drusilla, sadly, was the one most horribly victimized of the  Buffyverse "Fang Gang"; in this shot the tables are turned and she is a victimizer, licking the blood of the dead Slayer Xin Rong off of Spike's finger - and so death, violation, perverse sexuality are interwoven and repeated from person to person, from generation to generation.

   

"Best Love" was perhaps the biggest surprise of all the ones I won here because it was the simplest Icon I made, the one that had no special effects and I said, oh well, it's not great but it's something, throw it in. No one will look at it. (There's at least one of those in every single round, at least for me. Anyone else?)

 

For the banner I was inspired by design of tempertemper's gorgeous banners for slayerstillness Challenge 43 and her use of "radial blur" to try it for myself. The font isn't specifically "period" but it has a slightly vintage feel and reminds me of fonts I've seen on the covers of early 20th-century magazines. A photo or screencapture of the Summers' home exterior set provided the base image. I confess that I don't recall where exactly I found this photo; my apologies to whoever posted it originally. (Or for that matter, whoever shot/taped the original image.)



The icon setentpet chose is my favorite of my four entries for this round, and the only one I made multiple alts for. I kept fiddling with the color, sharpness, glow, added floral layers; tried to make it look more like a pencil drawing, etc. before finally deciding on one of the earliest versions. I'm not sure it's the very best alt I could have submitted, but I liked the softness and glow, and even that tiny touch of color reflected in Buffy's hair.

Alts:   5.  6. 7. 8. 9.

         10. 11. 12. 13.



1, 9 - 13) kikimay encouraged me to keep experimenting with floral textures after my fourth entry for Challenge 116 also won Mod's Choice.

With #1, I simply liked how the flowers echoed the pattern of the wallpaper, and the colors of Anya's hair, lipstick and clothes; so there was really no particular "meta" meaning there. (Although if you want to read meta meaning into it by all means do!)  With the Buffy/Joyce icons I think I was trying for a sense of the banality of domesticity, as well an echo of the flowers Joyce received from Brian that we've just seen, and a suggestion of funeral flowers. I don't think it worked and at any rate it distracted from the main image. Fun to experiment with, though.


2, 4) Yeah, it's the latest in my "Buffy and dead Joyce" series and I have to say, one of my favorite things about my most recent btvsats20in20 entries is that I made two - count 'em, two! - icons of Joyce, by herself and alive.  That said - I will always maintain that Joyce's death is the single most traumatic thing that happens to Buffy, aside perhaps from being resurrected. Even above killing Angel, although that's certainly in the mix.*

I've said it before - the men in Buffy's life are important to her but Joyce is at the core of her being, her constant.  Even if Joss never quite got that and Joyce was shunted to the sidelines. For someone who "gets it", check out velvetwhip's  WIP, Answering Prayers. If you feel about Joyce's neglect in canon the way I do, Answering Prayers makes everything better.**

3) If you didn't know what that image is, you probably wouldn't know what that is? I tried other images from Forever, an unjustly overlooked episode because it follows the Body.  If it were a masterpiece in and of itself it would still be overlooked and it isn't, but it deserves better than the neglect it tends to get. Several folks voted it best light use this round, and thank you to those who did. The caps in this last scene in Forever are terribly dark and difficult to work with.


* I started making a list of the traumatic things Buffy endures and gave up when it got really, really long. And then I started thinking about Dawn and the list got exponentially longer Instead of hating on them for what they don't get right, I'd rather hug them, congratulate them and marvel that neither one ends the series in a catatonic state for the remainder of their days, utterly ground down beneath Life's Heel. I don't think I could endure a fifth of what Buffy and Dawn do with any semblance of sanity.

** Who's with me on the Summers Women lovefest?