1 - 4

Arranged roughly from most painterly/stylized to photographic/realistic.  I'm really pleased with how #1 and it's alts (below) turned out.  I layered several textures by lookslikerain that give it the look of a post-impressionist oil pastel by Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas or Toulouse-Latrec.

Alts and extras:

5 - 10

I couldn't resist stealing teragramm's idea to make the Buffyverse ladies redheads. (Teragramm's are much superior, of course.)

       11 - 15

        16 - 20

        1 - 5

My original intent was to only use caps amoung the examples Starry provided; it didn't quite end up that way. Nor did I recall planning on making them so consistent color-wise.  I did want to use unsual or rarely used caps as much as possible and I think I succeeded, especially with the two images from Where the Wild Things Are. The girlish pigtails bely the fact that she is someone who possesses a great deal of power and knowledge passed on by her mother and the women of her family. Tara's own power and knowledge are terribly underplayed after S4 and this is something I will never be happy about. Because it ends up being a double-whammy of the show's "issues with powerful women".

   6 - 12

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.

     2)           3)

#2 is actually the first version of the banner I made. Since it's the central object in the story I figured out that I wanted to use it to "frame" an image of Buffy skating and found one that had a large enough center space. In the story the scrunchie is made of hot pink fabric printed with bears "cavorting across" it. The scrunchie, the bears "printed" on it, and the bears in the background are three separate layers. I changed the orientation of the fabric when I added it to the background so it wouldn't look like I'd plunked it down once over the entire banner and called it a day. I wanted the "print" to look authentic. I also added a tight canvas weave texture from ipiccy to make it look even more like a real fabric. Poster #1 has an additional plush pile fabric texture added for the soft grey lines and to help blur the background pattern a little.

I could have stopped there but I felt it needed something more. #2 is a cute image but it isn't evocative of anything; it has layers in the literal sense of the image but no emotional layers, no complexity. Most of the story takes place in a cemetary while Buffy is on routine patrol and is reflective of Buffy's mindset at that moment.  So I went back to a wider version, added the large image of Buffy from What's My Line, and layered a shot from CWDP's cemetary to fill in the Buffy-shaped silhouette and create a sense of atmosphere and emotion. Then I cut around the large obelisk headstone from the same shot and added that to the right side, to balance the poster visually.

The images of a cemetary in #1 and the posters below is from Conversations with Dead People. For #3 I layered and blended cemetary shots from CWPD with an image from Forever (right side of the poster).I'm pleased with how seamlessly the two blended together but of course I'm using the image of Buffy and of the scrunchie to mask any "joins". I like the softness and deep blue tones of #3 quite a bit but it feels as though something is missing that would pull it all together.

The loopy font in 1 - 3 was meant to look like cursive Buffy might have written, something somewhat feminine. I switched fonts to something slightly more elegant for the variant below:


If you click  4 - 7 to see them full-size (they're rather large) - did you spot where I added my "signature stamp"?

4)   5)

Confession: I love this version and all most of it's variants, I truly do. Same image of Buffy skating and the scunchy but without the cemetary shots replacing the bears in the background; the large image of Buffy is from Doublemeat Palace and the way her face fit into the contours of the fabric band was pure serendipity. (And yes my ongoing love affair with Sarah's face continues unabated. kikimay will understand.)


6)    7)

So what's the problem? They're not right for spuffy_luvr's story. They don't imply the moments of lightness, humor  and strange whimsy in "Come Out Come Out...." They're more of piece with the poster I did for velvetwhip's offering . Possibly a Bergman film - but not this story. And I highly doubt that anyone is going to remix "Come Out..." or that there will ever again be a need for a poster that includes Buffy, ice skating, a cemetary, and a bear-print scrunchie. Though I've been proven wrong before.


I still love this one, though. And it's simple enough that I was able to get a icons out of it; posters 1-3 are  to complicated image-wise to make good icons without being entirely reworked.

8) 9)  

Table generated using angelamaria's Icon Table Generator.
Icons by their own makers.
  ************

My personal favorites: 1-5 and 9-10, which covers all the WIllow-VampWillow meta-icons. I did a lot of work with layers this round, and I love the meta possibilities of the technique.  I have to laugh because back in Round 1 I didn't even know what a "layer" was, or what comlodge meant when she advise me to master "blending" technqiues; now I'm absolutely addicted.  I'm a little surprised by how many icons I did in orange here because it's not my favorite color IRL, but it has a warmth that yellows sometimes lack (especially when they're on the greenish side) which makes it less dramatic and friendlier than red with it's association of blood, passion and death.

Every one of those was "almost" an entry that I dropped at the last minute, especiallly #1; it was originally the segueway icon between green and blue on the rainbow, and I'm not sure now why I dropped it except that it repeated the image from Prophecy Girl in my entry icon #1, and there is a line along the edge that looked to me like a mistake in cropping rather than something done intentionally.

#2 I think is an awesome icon; it's unlike anything I've ever done before but I've admired in professional graphics on book covers and movie posters. But it's so muted I couldn't find a way to place it in the rainbow, and I admit I worried that the fact that the faces don't line up perfectly would be considered a flaw by voters. Which strikes me now as a really silly thing to worry about.

Both #4 & 5 were very nearly my Red entry in the rainbow. If you've seen my Round 2 Category set entries you know how much I adore that image of VampWillow in #4. I really like the faded photo effect here; she looks entirely like a queen of the silent movies. But I have worked with the image before and this really isn't saying anything new, the blood spatter is nifty but looks to me like I slapped it on and called it a day. Looks neat though.

5 is a really weird icon IMO - I like it, a lot and I can't explain why (except my fallback mantra: pale skin, red lips ). It's interesting to look at; her hair and face look like they are reflecting something and very glossy. But it's also "off" somehow. I kept taking it in and out of rotation until I looked at it in the slideshow format in Photobucket and saw the pixilation and flaws in the image more clearly.

#6 made me realize why some of my friends in Willow fandom prefer the early seasons to the late one; and if I were a Willow fan, I would probably feel the same. All of these were tons of fun to make except #6. No offense to those who enjoy her but I honestly hate working with S6 DarkWillow imagery - absolutely hate hate hate loathe it. (But then I also didn't think that Lily going red-eyed with rage in HIMYM was at all funny. Oh, Tara.....)

If anyone else had made #7 I'd be completely agog and over the moon over it, and wonder how in the world they achieved that look.  I finally make one that looks like this and my reaction is - meh, whatever. It's pretty, it's smooth, it has a nice graphic quality that will make for an eye-catching icon, it just doesn't move me in any way or make me want to look closer.

I'm more interested in #9-12, which are variations of my #4 entry.  My actual entry uses an orange cloudscape from a photo my sweetie took recently as the texture that links the two Willows; although alt 12 might actually achieve that link with a more unified look and without the distraction of the texture. (But the one I chose for my entry just made me happy. Sue me.) My favorite alt here is #10 because I love the grunge quality in the back - it looks to me like VampWillow's image is part of the wall behind Willow, an old poster or mural that has faded over time; but I also like the warm orange color of #9.


BTW, while working on this round the on Monday I goofed and decided to move all my 20in20 entry folders in Photobucket - forgetting that would break all the links. NOT GOOD. So if you've been looking at my previous 20in20 posts and see a lot of blank spaces - that be the reason.

    02-05
I couldn't remember where I got the phrase for #3 until I looked again at velvetwhip's userpics the other day; although I was vaguely aware of a debt to Barbara Krueger (and goodness knows how many graphic artists.) I had always wanted to do that combination of text overlay with out-of-focus close-up.


      06-10

        

11-14
I had a lot of fun playing with this cap.  Really.  To other folks these might be old hat but to me they were something in the way of luminousity I'd never achieved in an image before. I didn't even notice until I was nearly finished with the set how the flame from the candle disappears into her hair but I love that it does. The trees in #13-15 & 23-25 are from a photo I took in my backyard.

15-18 You're not seeing all the deleted efforts. You're welcome!

19-21
Lessons learned: Save everything before I add text.  Apply the shine effect (21) after I save a textless version AND after I add text. I didn't. I wanted to add "Yoga is good for the body and soul". Couldn't scrunch it in, and the shine made it hard to read.

22-25
The resemblance of the trees to scars on Tara's face was one of those accidents that pleased me and completely freaked me out; unintentional in any case, and you can read into it what you like, or nothing at all. Be back before Dawn....