Round 15: (Buffy-heavy at first. Of course. This is me, this is my brain on the Buffyverse.)
             8 - 14

            15 - 21

    

              22 - 28
After I cleaned the cap up I finally saw that the picture on locker behind Buffy is vintage comic book art, possibly a blow-/print of a Roy Lichtenstein piece, with the SDHS "Razorbacks" pennant covering the eyes of a pretty blonde woman in the picture. Meta commentary on the storyline or just an inside joke?  The fact that we see Cordy blindfolded later and no one can "see" Marcy Ross suggests either reading is possible. It seems to coincidental to be a, well, a coincidence.

         29 - 34

          35 - 40

        41 - 45
The flashbacks in the episode look great as screencaps but they're hard to work with; they're overlit as opposed to the rest of the early seasons material, which tends to be underlit.

      46 - 49

Also, I need to take some tutorials on working with skin tones for people of color, especially dark tones and not turn beautiful deep browns into weird shades of orange-red, or flat black. (We've just acquired PS btw, so I'm still fumbling along in ipiccy.)  #49: for the theme "green" I thought, well, I'll just tint the entire icon to go with the chalkboard behind her. Except that it doesn't look very good. Green skin? Usually associated with sickness or aliens? I should have known better. Plus, "black" skin reacts differently to tinting than "white" skin does.*
   
But it's the second association that bothers me. Our culture has a nearly long history of excluding black characters and actors from science fiction, horror and fantasy in literature, film and tv, except as background filler or literal "space aliens", demons and monsters. People of color as people just did not exist, with count-on-one-hand exceptions.

This may be changing now, I guess - slowly - but this is the reality I grew up with and "it's starting to get better" (by whatever yardstick you want to measure "better") doesn't undo decades of absence. So it just makes me uncomfortable, even if I don't "mean anything by it", I'd rather not go in that direction.**

  1- 2



***************

Thank you to Challenge 57 voters for Most Creative Award (a category I don't score very often so I consider it quite the desirable prize indeed), and thank you starry_night for the Mod's Choice Award!  The Dara in Becoming / Buffy in Halloween icons were all inspired by shapinglight's entry for the 2015 iwry_marathon , "Third Wheel". The costume Ethan supplies Buffy has somewhat different effects than in canon, linking Buffy and Darla telepathically across the centuries. Banners for this round by yours truly; vintage dancer image, and floral "frame" in icon #6, from The Graphics Fairy.

    

  3 - 7

  8 - 11

12 - 16

17 - 22

Fun fact: when I looked very closely at the screencap of Angel's sketch of a lady in "Halloween", the text next to her reads, as best as I can decipher, "Sarah Goodfriend."  I've often wondered if the drawing was a actually a portrait of one of his victims.

***********************

My awards for Round 14 of btvsats20in20; thank you for everyone who voted for my work!  Congratuations to sweet_lyri and gabby227 for their wins; their awards banners as well as all the winning entries can be seen here and here respectively. Banners by yours truly. For the background images I used my personal photos of New England skyscapes in a nod to this round's "In the Clouds" theme.

This is the third time I've won the gold medal for Category set, so it's a nice way to end the year.  The Numbers icon is one of my favorites of this set, so I'm pleased and proud that the voters honored it.

Click images below for full size or check out all the banners here. All banners by yours truly, 2015; icons by their respective artists.



The background image is from a photo I took this past weekend, when the clouds came down to meet the earth.

        2 - 3)

I prefer the brighter version myself but in any case I realized (and my lovely beta confirmed) that it was too showy to be a proper awards banner and would only overwhelm the icons it was meant to highlight and honor. So I went with another design but I'd love to see this used for a fanfiction poster. I don't know of any Xander Nightmares fics off the top of my head but I confess I don't read a lot of Xander fic.  So if anyone knows of a story or any author would like to claim this, let me know and I can personalize it to suit.


Per velvetwhip's rec I asked sparrow2000 if she'd be interested; she graciously declined as she hadn't written anything that this would go with, but am I now reading her fic Cracks in the World. (Her prose is amazing.) Perhaps lusciousxander or aadler? eurydice72? Suggestions, anyone?

Alt # 3) I made a version with the tag line from the movie The Dark Knight because I couldn't resist.


Screencaps: Buffy the Vampire Slayer HD/Blu-Ray, Bloodqueen

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.

1. 2. 3.

If #2 looks familiar it should - it's the banner version of my Mod's Choice winner at slayerstillness Challenge 38. (Click #4 below to enlarge tempertemper's fabulous banner.) Tip o'the nip to my beta-Muse velvetwhip for her inspiration; I was working on the icons for that round and came across the texture in #1 that is a "handwritten" fragment of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Gabrielle mentioned an interest in AiW, and away my brain went hippity-hopping from there.

4. 5. 6. 7.

**************

8. 9. 10.

Once I started toying with the idea of Wonderland, the notion of Buffy literally going "down the rabbit hole" to meet the Master seemed a natural fit.

Indecisive as always, I suspect #8 is the best version; I thought I would like #9 more than I do. I found the triangle texture on forwallpaper.com but like almost everything on the internet I suspect it originates elsewhere.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20.