Icons

[icepixie]

loneraven gave me six icons to talk about. Comment if you want your own set.



I think this was one of the first icons I made after I learned how to use Photoshop--it's one of the oldest I have, anyway. I thought Chiana-as-Sancho-Panza looked really cool, with her gray skin and those bright colors. Plus she looks kind of dubious about something, which is always a useful icon to have. I should use it more.



This is the cover illustration from Warning: When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple. To be honest, aside from wearing purple, I will probably not be much like the old woman in the book/poem, but I use it as a kind of all-purpose "I am totally acting like an old lady" icon.



The photo came from a stock photography website, but I altered it from daylight to twilight. The text is from one of my favorite poems, Yeats's "The Wild Swans at Coole." The icon has a lot of uses--posts about poetry, photography, Irish stuff, autumn...it's quite versatile. And pretty.



Oh, Northern Exposure. I have several icons from that show, but I think this is my favorite. It's from the season four gag reel, an outtake from "Mud and Blood," when Maggie offers to scratch Joel's mosquito-bitten back as part of her vow to be a more positive person. I don't have my DVDs with me at the moment, but I think in the outtake, Rob Morrow makes some kind of joke, and Janine Turner splashes water over his head in retaliation. It's even more adorable than the part that made it into the episode. I just love the smiles each of them are wearing, and the sense of playfulness in the picture. I also like the documentation that episode provides of the softening of Maggie and Joel's relationship around that time in the show, after the bitterness of the Mike episodes but before they started dating.



This one is kind of a joke. When I started out to make an icon based on the "What do you hear?"/"Nothing but the rain" call and response between Papadama and Starbuck, I was originally going to do something a bit more moody, with rain on a window or something. But then I found that umbrella at a stock photo site, and fell in love with it. I figured it would go with the words and be kind of amusing to boot (can you imagine Starbuck with anything as wussy as an umbrella?), so there you have it.



My newest icon, since I am going through an X-Files renaissance. The shot is from a very early episode, where they're wandering through a field to get to some crop circles. I used Photoshop to give it a blue sky and then age it a bit. I like the sense of urgency--they're running toward something, and Scully is doggedly keeping up with Mulder-on-a-quest, and it's kind of mysterious. I've always liked pictures of people in fields, too. I'm not really sure why.