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

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

1-A




2

For his nomination, he used #3 at his journal. It's not in the style of the official buttons but I liked the way it came out. I then made myself a Fuffy-themed banner that I really like but again - not in the style of the official buttons so I've decided against using it. (The beautiful textures in both courtesy of sweet_lyri.)

  3 - 4

Images of Eliza, Amber and Sarah from The Chosen Two Gallery.

    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

Unlike velvetwhip and spuffy_luvr's stories this round, I didn't read Alice's story until yesterday when she posted it to the comm but I knew as soon as I read it that I'd want to make artwork for it. Summers sister bonding is my jam. Call it corny and nonsensical but I loved it when Buffy and Dawn fought side by side in Grave; when S7 began I was looking forward to more Summers Sister screentime and the season started promisingly enough in Lessons but Dawn was soon shunted off to the side. Alas.

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When making my own entry icons I set out with the goal of doing at least one Kennedy icon because I think the character gets a lot of hate, unfairly (and I say that as a Tara fan). I also wanted to make an icon with the "Trailer Park Girl".


I always see the baseball girl (white, presumably middle class - those uniforms ain't cheap, as I know from my siblings experiences) used in fanvideos, linking her visually to Buffy; Trailer Park Girl (TPG) is rarely utlilized but I'd be lying if I didn't say that the moment she stops her attacker is THE moment in the "Ready to Be Strong" sequence that gives me chills every time I watch it because it's something I lived as a girl: the fantasy of being able to stop the monster you live with. Technically we're seeing her when she's a Slayer, no longer a "Potential" but I wasn't going to let a little thing like technicalities bother me.

In both cases (Kennedy and Trailer Park Girl), I failed. I didn't give myself enough time to make a Kennedy icon; and I spent a lot of time trying to make one of TPG but the caps of her tend to be very poor quality, on top of the fact that the shots of her are already very dark. Oddly enough, the caps from Lessons and Beneath You (2 - 3) are also very dark but brightened and cleaned up beautifully.

The only entry with TPG that I liked well enough has her hand stopping her assailant's arm (#5); her face isn't in the frame. This bothers me a lot because I'm implying, unintentionally, that she's not "pretty" enough to be seen; and btvs is yet another American television show where all the important girls are small and pretty. (Amber Benson being an exception and she was hired over Mr Potato Head Joss's intital objections over her size.)

So I decided to make her the focus of these banners and treat her to the same soft glowing effects and light leaks that I've lavished on SMG or Aly Hannigan without making her any less "herself" or minimizing her difference.

My alt icons:


          6 - 11

         12 -16