talking meme: my avatar
kass prompted: "Would you talk about how you created your Ratcreature avatar (did it evolve into the current recognizable form, or have you always drawn it this way?) and what do you enjoy about having a customizable avatar of yourself?
This is going to be a bit rambly, because the origins of my avatar are something of a confluence of things.
I got my LJ in September 2002, and at that time I already had chosen "RatCreature" as my pseud for my website and generally for posting in places that were indexed by search engines, though I had used my first name on mailing lists earlier. On my website I had initially a color-shifted picture of a rat as image to go with the pseud, but that wasn't very fannish or personal and I wasn't invested in that. Icons were an important marker to recognize people, so I wanted mine to be unique and recognizable (I didn't really think I needed more than one initially, little did I know, heh), and a picture of a pet didn't fit that. Also at that particular time I didn't actually keep rats, though I had before.
Of course many fans chose pictures of their favorite characters/actors and such, but I wasn't comfortable to represent myself through photos of other people or objects or something like that, I wanted my icon to be *me* and completely mine not just a rat, but I also didn't want to use a photo of my face, in part because my LJ was for my fannish pseud not about RL. On blogs and on LJ as well many artists choose a drawn self-portrait as avatar, so I decided to do that, even though back in 2002 I hadn't drawn any fanart. There was much less fanart then, and all the art I've seen for the online media fandoms I'd been in had been very realistic art, so not suited to my style or abilities at all.
But I had drawn goofy cartoons a lot in school when I was bored in lessons, which teachers generally tolerated because I wasn't disruptive and could still follow the material and participate even while getting a lot of drawing done. Being lazy by nature I appreciated that I could get good grades without much effort and had strongly resisted any suggestions that I ought to skip grades, and I liked my classmates too for the most part, so I got a lot of doodling done. Anyway, the things I doodled were mostly funny creatures with big noses, initially just with feet and no arms, and some had trunks like these in this very old drawing. I've also always loved anthropomorphic animals, and comics with them. Not quite a furry inclination (I've never been into cosplay), but the Mary Sue self insertion characters in my early teenage fantasies looked like this.
So I generally didn't draw cartoon humans, but anthropomorphic animals and odd creatures in my cartoons. By the time I was finishing high school I regular drew creatures that looked quite similar to my avatar to represent humans, not just me but humans in general, in cartoons for our school paper and such. So naturally in our end of high school yearbook ("Abizeitung") on which committee I was (and suffered much frustration) on my personal page I drew myself like that, rather than as a cartoony human resembling me.
Anyway, when I needed a default image for LJ a few years later I thought back to that, and pretty much took the image from the second panel from the old personal page above, removed the braid, because in 2002 my hair was short and I wasn't wearing a braid like in high school, and made it smile, but I didn't really start drawing RatCreature icons just yet, I had just modified that one picture.
So I had my first icon, and it was good as default, but of course fans did a lot of things with icons on LJ in 2002/2003, There were icon memes and icon makers doing certain themes and such, and being as much of lemming as the next fan, I wanted to participate and have icons like the other fans had, but I still wanted my icons to be unique and immediately recognizable. You can see how that is something of a problem.
One of the prominent icon things at that time that many people had were
lanning's "zen fen", with calm pictures and such. I wanted one, but still didn't want to represent myself by an object, like a pond or a zen garden. Also, in kerfluffles I'm not actually very zen (then even lessthan now), so I thought it would be funny make mine a little different, and in February 2003 I drew my zen...or not icon. You notice how the angry posture is pretty much copied from the typical Donald Duck outburst, a scan of which you can also see on my personal high school page. I think I've gotten smoother drawing my avatar with practice since then.
That sort of broke a dam, because the same month I made my first fandom themed avatar, Batman!RatCreature, because I was very much into Batman comic fandom then, and posting about that, and it seemed easy to dress up my avatar with a Batman costume, to have a fandom icon and still a recognizable image that would be me. Sort of like virtual cosplay. Free LJs had three icon slots back then, iirc, and in the Batman GIP post I said "BTW, were I using this LJ and not my blog as main journal, and thus paid for a LJ and had more icons, I would have more different moods and actions with my cartoon personality." (I had started a blog on my own website earlier and was still posting there and on LJ).
Of course with other fans being awesome and enabling, I was promptly gifted with some paid account time, and drew Happy!RatCreature as a celebratory response the same day, and the next day followed Spiderman, Superman, and a tv watching RatCreature, and that has expanded to now 136 icons.
What I still really like about my decision to stick with my avatar in variations as icons, is that all of my icons are recognizable as "me" regardless of their topic or fandom, once you are familiar with their basic "premise", even if you haven't seen that particular icon before. I like that my picture can always be me yet still be flexible and express my mood, so I don't have to be a Sad Panda one day and a Grumpy Cat the next in my images, but I am sad RatCreature and a grumpy RatCreature etc. It does take a little more effort to make new icons and to adapt icon memes and such to my theme, so that can be a bit frustrating at times, but it can also be really fun, and it has been inspiring me to draw. I'm not sure I would have started to draw anything in fandom without first venturing into fannish drawing through these doodles where I couldn't really do anything "wrong" or not get characters right or anything like that, because it is just my avatar.
This entry was originally posted at http://ratcreature.dreamwidth.org/538179.html. |
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