2012 Icon Retrospective
I know. It's February 2013 already. This post is at least a month late. I have always meant to do a retrospective and look back at my year of making icons (same with other things in my life) but, as luck would have it, I've been sick, swamped with impossible deadlines at work, and had a root canal done. January has not been my month.
Nevertheless, this was a very interesting exercise. I got back into iconning this year with theiconquest, straight from 2006 (okay, I made maybe one or two icon posts in the middle). When I stopped making icons, there wasn't much of a community to speak of, at least any that I knew of; I knew about contests and I participated in a few, but I didn't really know or have any maker friends. When I got back, I was in for a surprise, and not all of it fun; I was psyched there was a community I could participate in, but there were misunderstandings and people passing judgment and all those usual things that happen in a community. I'm glad I held on, though, because I've met so many wonderful people through this hobby.
2013 is looking out to be a very busy year for iconmaking and icon communities for me, which makes having my muse kind of mostly gone a bit difficult--but you know what, in the middle of marking up those bestof-icons voting entries and filling out voting forms, I thought, damn, there are so many talented, amazing people here! And I mean it. I felt so lucky to be part of this community, to be doing something for this community. I didn't even feel very sad that I couldn't make icons that I liked then--just being around was enough.
For all of you who have talked to me, commented on my icons, befriended me--anything at all--thank you for making 2012 an amazing year. ♥
OK YEAH I SHOULD STOP TALKING
Statistics
Icon posts in 2012: 27
Total icons in 2012: 977
Communities participated in: 15
Watchers: 205
07 July: 25 icons
Featuring: Wheel of Time, Hellboy, Lord of the Rings, stock
This was a batch I made for the first challenge at theiconquest. It was my first ever icon batch after a very long hiatus. So you've got a bunch of old skool stuff in there, such as the stripey pixel backgrounds, the 1px borders. On the whole I don't think it was terrible; I had, er, non-catastrophic compositions, for the most part? Not like...
07 July: 10 icons
Featuring: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Diablo III, Merlin, Wheel of Time, Wicked
This set has the weirdest, ugliest icons I've made in 2012. I was going for a Wizard theme (thematically and based on the Wizard class at theiconquest) plus needed to match colors. The result is HORRENDOUS. I keep wanting to delete this post, lol.
10 July: 36 icons
Featuring: Lord of the Rings
I've started experimenting more with colors here, and while some are just plain trippy, there are a few that aren't too bad. Just lacking in contrast and definition for the most part. I was going through my own caps for LOTR here, one by one. I planned to do the whole trilogy like this, but ummm no that didn't happen.
15 July: 60 icons
Featuring: Lord of the Rings, The Dark Tower, Emma, Enchanted, Stardust, Maleficient/The Sleeping Beauty, Wheel of Time, The Last Unicorn, Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, Harry Potter
More LOTR icons, and I found scans of the Dark Tower graphic novels and made icons of that, too. I started dropping the pixel borders in the middle of this set; at this point I also started my love affair with removing backgrounds for icons. Uh hunh.
23 July: 10 icons
Featuring: Lord of the Rings, Stardust, Tangled, Peter Pan, stock
Small set, so no real changes here, I think. More experiments with composition and color.
24 July: 29 icons
Featuring: Emma
Ahhh my favorite theiconquest challenge: Mentors! For the challenge we were to pick a maker and make icons inspired by their overall work. I picked those whose text work I has been enjoying for a while (well, since I got back, which is like...less than a month by then). It was a challenge, not just to make icons inspired by their work but to make sure it's not ripoff material or anything of the sort.
28 July: 49 icons
Featuring: Lord of the Rings, Emma
More LOTR, are you bored yet? Some initial foray into black and white icons; that Saruman icon is still one of my favorites. Also my first trials at blocking, with disastrous results.
31 July: 22 icons
Featuring: Whitechapel
Another Mentors challenge for theiconquest. I think the biggest thing I learned with this set is: muted/pale is actually hard. Also lots of cutting out of folks. I was very slow with this. I'm getting better, but it's still tedious. Also, Whitechapel! Here's a secret: I still haven't finished it. I'm sorry, I get so tense watching it alone ;(
03 August: 20 icons
Featuring: Harry Potter, The Avengers
Oh gawd. Another palette sidequest for theiconquest, another disaster at trying to match colors. Seriously, I had no idea how to match the palette colors and it shows. It's worse with the wizard/complexity/composition icons, too. Ugh. This set was basically just a disaster with colors.
10 August: 34 icons
Featuring: Persuasion, Harry Potter, Hawaii Five-0, Supernatural, Sherlock, Misfits (I think?), Teen Wolf, Downton Abbey, Marie Antoinette, Becoming Austen, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Jane Eyre, The King's Speech
I started trying out other icon communities and challenges around this time, hence the beginning of random addition of multifandom things on my icon posts.
11 August: 21 icons
Featuring: Blade Runner, Hunger Games, Stardust, Casanova, Flash
One of my favorite batches ever, hands down. I took a crazy long time with this set (the posted dates lie!). Up until that time, this was the most challenging set ever. I had been admiring pamkips's work ever since I first encountered it, and this was my attempt at something like her style. Obviously not everything worked out as well as I'd hoped, as Blade Runner caps are super dark and her style is bright...yeah that was a challenge. However...this batch made me grow, forced me to grow, as a maker. It challenged me and punished me and gave me a headache, and I learned so much through it all.
13 August: 25 icons
Featuring: Batman
My first set for inspired20in20. I had a lot of fun making this set, as well as actually laying out the entry for it. I should try doing entries like this some more. It's fun, and I kind of like how almost every icon has an "introduction" for it. (Of course, that would get old pretty fast.)
15 August: 23 icons
Featuring: Avengersverse, The Old Kingdom, Hunger Games, Batman Begins, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings, Prydain Chronicles, Little Women, The Dark Tower, The Amazing Spider-Man, Cabin in the Woods, Roswell, The Vampire Diaries, Homeland, Being Human
Mmmm the start of entries where the miscellaneous icons number more than the non-misc ones, usually because of caps supplied in challenges and the like (i.e. iconflashes). It makes for messy posts, but I have to admit, working with different caps really does help with practice. Also, I am a bit proud of that Lirael icon because I gave her hair porn.
25 August: 27 icons
Featuring: Aladdin, Alice in Wonderland, The Avengers, Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, The Emperor's New Groove, Game of Thrones, Hercules, Loreena McKennitt, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, Tarzan, The Lion King, The Little Mermaid
This was the first set where I worked primarily with animated fandoms. It really is a different kind of process, but so enjoyable as well. I started having a mini-love-affair with circles and yellow in this batch. Can you tell?
31 August: 54 icons
Featuring: The Avengers, Indiana Jones, (500) Days of Summer, Beauty and the Beast, Bambi, Blade Runner, Casanova, Game of Thrones, Hercules, How I Met Your Mother, Jane Eyre, Mansfield Park, Marie Antoinette, Mulan, Northanger Abbey, Red Riding Hood, Stardust, Suburgatory, The Hunger Games, The Little Mermaid
I took a while with this set, mostly because of the Indiana Jones icons. When I started this, there were no HQ caps of Indy and so it was a bit of a challenge to get any kind of quality in there (and I think it shows). The rest of the post were all for other one-off challenges and contests. Weelllll...a bunch of them are really off.
02 September: 28 icons
Featuring: The Avengers, Indiana Jones
Yum, Indiana Jones and Tony Stark and text. Ahem. This batch is a rather warm batch, mostly yellows and oranges. I don't really know what to say about it. Other than: those two Indy icons (night/snakes) are the ones I really love from this batch, but I have no idea how/when to use them. :P
13 September: 63 icons
Featuring: The Hunger Games, Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, Adventure Time, Beauty and the Beast, Lilo and Stitch, Cars, Scott Pilgrim vs The World, Alice in Wonderland
This was my first (brave) attempt at joining an icon battle! I've been really, really nervous about doing this. I thought it looked like a lot of fun, and while I have been entering icon contests, icon battles felt like another thing entirely--it's non-competitive (no voting) but your icons are pretty much going toe to toe with someone else's. It's a bit scary and intimidating. But I'm glad I tried, because battles are fun as long as you don't let that pressure get to you :) This entry was three icon battles, in fact: one for theiconquest, another for iconbattling, and another for anime20in20. I swear I didn't think of only posting battle icons. It just happened!
14 September: 51 icons
Featuring: The Avengers, Hansel and Gretel
Colors, colors everywhere! This was the Gradients sidequest for theiconquest and a color-centric inspired20in20 round, too. Remember that Palette sidequest? Well this experience wasn't as bad as that, but it was almost as painful. Also, there you can see a horrible, horrible attempt at a panoramic set, and you can see IT WENT HORRIBLY. I'm actually amazed I didn't scrap the whole thing before submitting it to theiconquest.
22 September: 85 icons
Featuring: The Hunger Games, Silver Linings Playbook, Suits, The Avengers, Snow White and the Huntsman, The Sound of Music, Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, Stardust, Sense and Sensibility, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emma, Maleficient, Chronicles of Narnia, Cat Street, Astro Boy, Paradise Kiss, The Amazing Spider-Man, Chuck, The Fades, Legend of the Seeker, Merlin, Miranda, Moulin Rogue, No 1 Lady's Detective Agency, Once Upon a Time, Pushing Daisies, Sons of Anarchy, Teen Wolf
...that fandom list is TIRING to type out. This was a mix of quests plus icon contest submissions, hence it's just pretty much everything in the same bucket. A lot of my favorites are in this set, which is why it was kind of difficult to pick five to show up here. I'm in a composition phase at this point, so my early attempts at splicing and random blending and the like are here.
23 October: 88 icons
I am NOT even attempting to write down everything. I am sorry, but I AM NOT.
Two massive battle posts in one, complete with all my alternates for the battles. I held a guild battle for iq-themountains and had a Favorite Movies battle, and they were due roughly the same time, and my muse had left me. What ended up happening was I crammed making all 70 icons in two weeks. Seriously, I don't know what the hell I was thinking. So it's really just a very eclectic/weird mixed bag of...stuff.
27 October: 6 icons and a "tumblr" and a random drabble thing
Featuring: Hana Yori Dango, Bubblegum Crisis
Yeaaaaahhh there's no point going to the entry, unless you'd like to read the maudlin piece of fanfic I wrote. I just wanted to get something out for myriadis, as I had been wanting to participate for so long omg but I never got around to it. Writing is my first love but after stopping, I've never been able to get my inner editor to quit scaring me off. So, yeah. I'm sad it's closed now :( But that Cool Down The Fire Priss icon is one of my favorites.
02 November: 42 icons
Featuring: Hana Yori Dango, 5 Centimeters Per Second
This is one of my favorite posts of 2012, partly because IT'S DOMYOJI TSUKASA HOW CAN IT NOT BE A FAVORITE and also because I tried my hand at manga coloring. Even coloring in just a section of the page for my 100x100 icon takes so much work, I'm not even doing it properly I don't think, I can't imagine how amazingly talented those people who color full page scans are. They are amazing. In other news, I love 5cm/s but omg, could I have controlled myself with the light blobs please? :/
06 November: 33 icons
Featuring: Inception
This is also one of my favorite posts, for trope-overdosed's last round. I learned of that comm a bit late--something like the second-to-the-last round! So I was really sad that it closed as I wanted to participate so much. So for the last round, I made sure to do all the tropes, and because I must be unconsciously masochistic, I decided I'd just use one fandom for everything. This worked somewhat okay, until I realized I should have used a TV show fandom or something, because no, not all tropes are applicable to Inception! (See that Smoking is Cool icon? Yeah. Not one of them smoked on-film. Yippee.) Nevertheless I enjoyed making my set immensely :)
14 November: 26 icons
Featuring: Pitch Perfect
I watched this movie with a friend of mine and promptly got obsessed. The DVD wasn't out, so what did I do? I capped whatever videos I could find on Youtube and made icons off from it. Yup. This is pretty much where I started doing a lot of painting on my icons to bring out the colors in the cap.
18 November: 37 icons
Featuring: Howl's Moving Castle, Bubblegum Crisis, Fruits Basket, 5 Centimeters Per Second, Pandora Hearts, Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Ranma 1/2, Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Anastasia, The Black Cauldron, Hercules, Quest for Camelot, Thumbelina, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Saraiya Goyou, Mawaru Penguindrum, Sword Art Online, Another, Natsume Yuujinchou
A full animation icon post. The thing about making animation icons, is that when I switch between making non-animation then animation ones, I kind of end up having to start from scratch with making them :/ which is painful. You should check out the amazing work others have done, mine can't hold a candle to theirs.
15 December: 33 icons
Featuring: Lord of the Rings
What, were you starting to miss the LOTR spam? :P With the release of The Hobbit I'd been wanting to do some LOTR icons again, and just perfect timing, partioning was holding a battle. I'm not sure what else is there to say about this set; some caps were quite a challenge but that's the way it goes with battles.
19 December: 40 icons
Featuring: Friends, Emma, Suits, The Hunger Games, Inception, The Sound of Music, Looper, Avengers, Voltron, The Little Mermaid, Xena, Psych, Star Trek: TNG, House MD, Glee, Pride and Prejudice, The Dark Knight Rises premier, Ringer, World of Warcraft
A collection of multifandom icons for rumbles! This set contains my turbo-rumble set, which is one of my favorites--not just for the icons themselves but the actual round at turbo-rumble. All the concrit I've received, the way the voting has forced me to look at icons with a critical eye--not just others' but my own as well--is all very, very helpful and valuable. I redid a few of the icons with the most interesting concrit, as well.
Best of 2012
So the above was voted to be my best of 2012 icon. Thank you so much for everyone who has voted! It's interesting to know that won in the voting, as I don't think it got many comments when I initially posted that Pitch Perfect set. Nevertheless I'm glad people like the icon ♥
I decided to include the rest of the icons that were nominated in the bestof-icons voting. I tried to keep the icons in order of the number of votes they received :)
[There are quite a few.]
And that is all! :)
WOW I FINISHED IT :O
Nevertheless, this was a very interesting exercise. I got back into iconning this year with theiconquest, straight from 2006 (okay, I made maybe one or two icon posts in the middle). When I stopped making icons, there wasn't much of a community to speak of, at least any that I knew of; I knew about contests and I participated in a few, but I didn't really know or have any maker friends. When I got back, I was in for a surprise, and not all of it fun; I was psyched there was a community I could participate in, but there were misunderstandings and people passing judgment and all those usual things that happen in a community. I'm glad I held on, though, because I've met so many wonderful people through this hobby.
2013 is looking out to be a very busy year for iconmaking and icon communities for me, which makes having my muse kind of mostly gone a bit difficult--but you know what, in the middle of marking up those bestof-icons voting entries and filling out voting forms, I thought, damn, there are so many talented, amazing people here! And I mean it. I felt so lucky to be part of this community, to be doing something for this community. I didn't even feel very sad that I couldn't make icons that I liked then--just being around was enough.
For all of you who have talked to me, commented on my icons, befriended me--anything at all--thank you for making 2012 an amazing year. ♥
OK YEAH I SHOULD STOP TALKING
Statistics
Icon posts in 2012: 27
Total icons in 2012: 977
Communities participated in: 15
Watchers: 205
07 July: 25 icons
Featuring: Wheel of Time, Hellboy, Lord of the Rings, stock
This was a batch I made for the first challenge at theiconquest. It was my first ever icon batch after a very long hiatus. So you've got a bunch of old skool stuff in there, such as the stripey pixel backgrounds, the 1px borders. On the whole I don't think it was terrible; I had, er, non-catastrophic compositions, for the most part? Not like...
07 July: 10 icons
Featuring: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Diablo III, Merlin, Wheel of Time, Wicked
This set has the weirdest, ugliest icons I've made in 2012. I was going for a Wizard theme (thematically and based on the Wizard class at theiconquest) plus needed to match colors. The result is HORRENDOUS. I keep wanting to delete this post, lol.
10 July: 36 icons
Featuring: Lord of the Rings
I've started experimenting more with colors here, and while some are just plain trippy, there are a few that aren't too bad. Just lacking in contrast and definition for the most part. I was going through my own caps for LOTR here, one by one. I planned to do the whole trilogy like this, but ummm no that didn't happen.
15 July: 60 icons
Featuring: Lord of the Rings, The Dark Tower, Emma, Enchanted, Stardust, Maleficient/The Sleeping Beauty, Wheel of Time, The Last Unicorn, Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, Harry Potter
More LOTR icons, and I found scans of the Dark Tower graphic novels and made icons of that, too. I started dropping the pixel borders in the middle of this set; at this point I also started my love affair with removing backgrounds for icons. Uh hunh.
23 July: 10 icons
Featuring: Lord of the Rings, Stardust, Tangled, Peter Pan, stock
Small set, so no real changes here, I think. More experiments with composition and color.
24 July: 29 icons
Featuring: Emma
Ahhh my favorite theiconquest challenge: Mentors! For the challenge we were to pick a maker and make icons inspired by their overall work. I picked those whose text work I has been enjoying for a while (well, since I got back, which is like...less than a month by then). It was a challenge, not just to make icons inspired by their work but to make sure it's not ripoff material or anything of the sort.
28 July: 49 icons
Featuring: Lord of the Rings, Emma
More LOTR, are you bored yet? Some initial foray into black and white icons; that Saruman icon is still one of my favorites. Also my first trials at blocking, with disastrous results.
31 July: 22 icons
Featuring: Whitechapel
Another Mentors challenge for theiconquest. I think the biggest thing I learned with this set is: muted/pale is actually hard. Also lots of cutting out of folks. I was very slow with this. I'm getting better, but it's still tedious. Also, Whitechapel! Here's a secret: I still haven't finished it. I'm sorry, I get so tense watching it alone ;(
03 August: 20 icons
Featuring: Harry Potter, The Avengers
Oh gawd. Another palette sidequest for theiconquest, another disaster at trying to match colors. Seriously, I had no idea how to match the palette colors and it shows. It's worse with the wizard/complexity/composition icons, too. Ugh. This set was basically just a disaster with colors.
10 August: 34 icons
Featuring: Persuasion, Harry Potter, Hawaii Five-0, Supernatural, Sherlock, Misfits (I think?), Teen Wolf, Downton Abbey, Marie Antoinette, Becoming Austen, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Jane Eyre, The King's Speech
I started trying out other icon communities and challenges around this time, hence the beginning of random addition of multifandom things on my icon posts.
11 August: 21 icons
Featuring: Blade Runner, Hunger Games, Stardust, Casanova, Flash
One of my favorite batches ever, hands down. I took a crazy long time with this set (the posted dates lie!). Up until that time, this was the most challenging set ever. I had been admiring pamkips's work ever since I first encountered it, and this was my attempt at something like her style. Obviously not everything worked out as well as I'd hoped, as Blade Runner caps are super dark and her style is bright...yeah that was a challenge. However...this batch made me grow, forced me to grow, as a maker. It challenged me and punished me and gave me a headache, and I learned so much through it all.
13 August: 25 icons
Featuring: Batman
My first set for inspired20in20. I had a lot of fun making this set, as well as actually laying out the entry for it. I should try doing entries like this some more. It's fun, and I kind of like how almost every icon has an "introduction" for it. (Of course, that would get old pretty fast.)
15 August: 23 icons
Featuring: Avengersverse, The Old Kingdom, Hunger Games, Batman Begins, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings, Prydain Chronicles, Little Women, The Dark Tower, The Amazing Spider-Man, Cabin in the Woods, Roswell, The Vampire Diaries, Homeland, Being Human
Mmmm the start of entries where the miscellaneous icons number more than the non-misc ones, usually because of caps supplied in challenges and the like (i.e. iconflashes). It makes for messy posts, but I have to admit, working with different caps really does help with practice. Also, I am a bit proud of that Lirael icon because I gave her hair porn.
25 August: 27 icons
Featuring: Aladdin, Alice in Wonderland, The Avengers, Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, The Emperor's New Groove, Game of Thrones, Hercules, Loreena McKennitt, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, Tarzan, The Lion King, The Little Mermaid
This was the first set where I worked primarily with animated fandoms. It really is a different kind of process, but so enjoyable as well. I started having a mini-love-affair with circles and yellow in this batch. Can you tell?
31 August: 54 icons
Featuring: The Avengers, Indiana Jones, (500) Days of Summer, Beauty and the Beast, Bambi, Blade Runner, Casanova, Game of Thrones, Hercules, How I Met Your Mother, Jane Eyre, Mansfield Park, Marie Antoinette, Mulan, Northanger Abbey, Red Riding Hood, Stardust, Suburgatory, The Hunger Games, The Little Mermaid
I took a while with this set, mostly because of the Indiana Jones icons. When I started this, there were no HQ caps of Indy and so it was a bit of a challenge to get any kind of quality in there (and I think it shows). The rest of the post were all for other one-off challenges and contests. Weelllll...a bunch of them are really off.
02 September: 28 icons
Featuring: The Avengers, Indiana Jones
Yum, Indiana Jones and Tony Stark and text. Ahem. This batch is a rather warm batch, mostly yellows and oranges. I don't really know what to say about it. Other than: those two Indy icons (night/snakes) are the ones I really love from this batch, but I have no idea how/when to use them. :P
13 September: 63 icons
Featuring: The Hunger Games, Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, Adventure Time, Beauty and the Beast, Lilo and Stitch, Cars, Scott Pilgrim vs The World, Alice in Wonderland
This was my first (brave) attempt at joining an icon battle! I've been really, really nervous about doing this. I thought it looked like a lot of fun, and while I have been entering icon contests, icon battles felt like another thing entirely--it's non-competitive (no voting) but your icons are pretty much going toe to toe with someone else's. It's a bit scary and intimidating. But I'm glad I tried, because battles are fun as long as you don't let that pressure get to you :) This entry was three icon battles, in fact: one for theiconquest, another for iconbattling, and another for anime20in20. I swear I didn't think of only posting battle icons. It just happened!
14 September: 51 icons
Featuring: The Avengers, Hansel and Gretel
Colors, colors everywhere! This was the Gradients sidequest for theiconquest and a color-centric inspired20in20 round, too. Remember that Palette sidequest? Well this experience wasn't as bad as that, but it was almost as painful. Also, there you can see a horrible, horrible attempt at a panoramic set, and you can see IT WENT HORRIBLY. I'm actually amazed I didn't scrap the whole thing before submitting it to theiconquest.
22 September: 85 icons
Featuring: The Hunger Games, Silver Linings Playbook, Suits, The Avengers, Snow White and the Huntsman, The Sound of Music, Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, Stardust, Sense and Sensibility, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emma, Maleficient, Chronicles of Narnia, Cat Street, Astro Boy, Paradise Kiss, The Amazing Spider-Man, Chuck, The Fades, Legend of the Seeker, Merlin, Miranda, Moulin Rogue, No 1 Lady's Detective Agency, Once Upon a Time, Pushing Daisies, Sons of Anarchy, Teen Wolf
...that fandom list is TIRING to type out. This was a mix of quests plus icon contest submissions, hence it's just pretty much everything in the same bucket. A lot of my favorites are in this set, which is why it was kind of difficult to pick five to show up here. I'm in a composition phase at this point, so my early attempts at splicing and random blending and the like are here.
23 October: 88 icons
I am NOT even attempting to write down everything. I am sorry, but I AM NOT.
Two massive battle posts in one, complete with all my alternates for the battles. I held a guild battle for iq-themountains and had a Favorite Movies battle, and they were due roughly the same time, and my muse had left me. What ended up happening was I crammed making all 70 icons in two weeks. Seriously, I don't know what the hell I was thinking. So it's really just a very eclectic/weird mixed bag of...stuff.
27 October: 6 icons and a "tumblr" and a random drabble thing
Featuring: Hana Yori Dango, Bubblegum Crisis
Yeaaaaahhh there's no point going to the entry, unless you'd like to read the maudlin piece of fanfic I wrote. I just wanted to get something out for myriadis, as I had been wanting to participate for so long omg but I never got around to it. Writing is my first love but after stopping, I've never been able to get my inner editor to quit scaring me off. So, yeah. I'm sad it's closed now :( But that Cool Down The Fire Priss icon is one of my favorites.
02 November: 42 icons
Featuring: Hana Yori Dango, 5 Centimeters Per Second
This is one of my favorite posts of 2012, partly because IT'S DOMYOJI TSUKASA HOW CAN IT NOT BE A FAVORITE and also because I tried my hand at manga coloring. Even coloring in just a section of the page for my 100x100 icon takes so much work, I'm not even doing it properly I don't think, I can't imagine how amazingly talented those people who color full page scans are. They are amazing. In other news, I love 5cm/s but omg, could I have controlled myself with the light blobs please? :/
06 November: 33 icons
Featuring: Inception
This is also one of my favorite posts, for trope-overdosed's last round. I learned of that comm a bit late--something like the second-to-the-last round! So I was really sad that it closed as I wanted to participate so much. So for the last round, I made sure to do all the tropes, and because I must be unconsciously masochistic, I decided I'd just use one fandom for everything. This worked somewhat okay, until I realized I should have used a TV show fandom or something, because no, not all tropes are applicable to Inception! (See that Smoking is Cool icon? Yeah. Not one of them smoked on-film. Yippee.) Nevertheless I enjoyed making my set immensely :)
14 November: 26 icons
Featuring: Pitch Perfect
I watched this movie with a friend of mine and promptly got obsessed. The DVD wasn't out, so what did I do? I capped whatever videos I could find on Youtube and made icons off from it. Yup. This is pretty much where I started doing a lot of painting on my icons to bring out the colors in the cap.
18 November: 37 icons
Featuring: Howl's Moving Castle, Bubblegum Crisis, Fruits Basket, 5 Centimeters Per Second, Pandora Hearts, Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Ranma 1/2, Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Anastasia, The Black Cauldron, Hercules, Quest for Camelot, Thumbelina, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Saraiya Goyou, Mawaru Penguindrum, Sword Art Online, Another, Natsume Yuujinchou
A full animation icon post. The thing about making animation icons, is that when I switch between making non-animation then animation ones, I kind of end up having to start from scratch with making them :/ which is painful. You should check out the amazing work others have done, mine can't hold a candle to theirs.
15 December: 33 icons
Featuring: Lord of the Rings
What, were you starting to miss the LOTR spam? :P With the release of The Hobbit I'd been wanting to do some LOTR icons again, and just perfect timing, partioning was holding a battle. I'm not sure what else is there to say about this set; some caps were quite a challenge but that's the way it goes with battles.
19 December: 40 icons
Featuring: Friends, Emma, Suits, The Hunger Games, Inception, The Sound of Music, Looper, Avengers, Voltron, The Little Mermaid, Xena, Psych, Star Trek: TNG, House MD, Glee, Pride and Prejudice, The Dark Knight Rises premier, Ringer, World of Warcraft
A collection of multifandom icons for rumbles! This set contains my turbo-rumble set, which is one of my favorites--not just for the icons themselves but the actual round at turbo-rumble. All the concrit I've received, the way the voting has forced me to look at icons with a critical eye--not just others' but my own as well--is all very, very helpful and valuable. I redid a few of the icons with the most interesting concrit, as well.
Best of 2012
So the above was voted to be my best of 2012 icon. Thank you so much for everyone who has voted! It's interesting to know that won in the voting, as I don't think it got many comments when I initially posted that Pitch Perfect set. Nevertheless I'm glad people like the icon ♥
I decided to include the rest of the icons that were nominated in the bestof-icons voting. I tried to keep the icons in order of the number of votes they received :)
[There are quite a few.]
And that is all! :)
WOW I FINISHED IT :O