Progression Post 2020 — Sheliak

[sheliak]

Note in advance—there's one NSFW icon in this batch (tasteful artistic nudity, I think, and obviously I love how it turned out, but not worksafe), and a couple with vulgar language, just in case that's going to be a problem.

Onward to the icons!

★ J a n u a r y ★

In January I participated in an icontalking remake challenge, after which I am afraid I vanished from the comm all year. I didn't mean to! But it was definitely a year in which it was easier to just do my own thing a lot of the time, I'm afraid. I did two posts—one as an outgrowth of the remakes (other things in those fandoms) and then a batch of Marvel 1602 icons based on canon review for a fanfic I did not end up having time to write in late 2019. The second post includes several 200px icons (including #4 up there, that's why it looks so much sharper than the others—it's literally twice as detailed! Click through to see what it actually looks like at full size.) Remake Marvel 1602 X-Men Six Ages & New Mutants (includes remakes)

★ F e b r u a r y ★

I made very few icons in February. However, I'm really happy with that pigeon icon (... it's probably much less funny without context but I really do like how the text turned out) and I made the art for the other two! (They're my representations of sealing, done for the Dreaming of Sunshine recursive fic fandom.) Incidentally, this month marks my third year of iconning! I put together a graphic, one icon per month to date, as a sort of alternate progression measure. (Just linking it because it's a big image with only a couple of 2020 icons in it anyway.) Pigeons Dreaming of Sunshine (includes some icons done March 1st)

★ M a r c h ★

In contrast, I did a ton of iconning in March! (It was the start of lockdown where I live...) Three of those posts were random, multifandom or no fandom stuff—just making icons out of any pretty pictures I could find or already had lying around. Three more were Tamora Pierce book covers—I worked hard on all three batches but in retrospect the Song of the Lioness ones definitely turned out the best! The Girl Genius iconpost is tiny—just five icons—and those icons are made from five panels in a row of Agatha's expressions changing. I like 'em best as a set. The Alphonse Mucha art set include some of my favorite work this year—I did some fairly major work on some of them to make them look like they were always meant to be squares rather than (usually) rectangles. Misc art & photos Brightly colored birds & stained glass windows Multifandom including X-Men comics & Glorantha tabletop RPG Circle of Magic book covers (also includes a couple of Star Trek: Voyager icons done for a request) The Circle Opens & The Circle Reforged book covers Song of the Lioness book covers Girl Genius Art by Alphonse Mucha

★ A p r i l ★

Almost all of the icons this month were gifts for rachelmanija, who asked for icons of her cats and garden. I had a lot of fun, and I think the text practice was really good for me too! Tiny post First batch for rachelmanija Secondbatch for rachelmanija

★ M a y ★

May was another off month; just one, not terribly ambitious post. (And the one text icon uses text that was there in the original—though I changed it from white to black to keep it legible when shrunk down.) Girl Genius

★ J u n e ★

And another off month! I did very, very little this month—two posts, both tiny. Hummingbirds Woody Guthrie's guitar (and Woody Guthrie)

★ J u l y ★

I only had two public icon posts this month, but did do a number of other icons. (Including some X-Men ones that ended up actually getting posted in November.) The Dani Moonstar Iconpost of Doom (as well as the New Mutants Iconpost of Additional Doom) is still in progress, by the way. Maybe this year? (... Some of the icons in it are embarrassing to me at this point—I've really improved—this is what comes of coimpletionism!). Random icons Six Ages (posted August 1 but done in July)

★ A u g u s t ★

And now, an icon-heavy month! I did a ton of icons for the Percy Jackson books and various spinoffs. I also did one challenge—Non Square Shapes on ic_animated. Percy Jackson and the Olympians The Heroes of Olympus Non Square Shapes (more Percy Jackson)

★ S e p t e m b e r ★

This month I did a tiny post of DFZ covers (it's a trilogy, so there wasn't that much to work with), a much larger one for the Kane Chronicles (also a trilogy, but one that's been translated and reissued a bunch and aso has quite a bit of official art). Then, instead of going on to do the Magnus Chase and Trials of Apollo books like I'd planned (I had meant to round out that universe), I got bored and went off to do Glorantha icons. I'm happy with some of them, but I didn't do a good job with the detail on all—the shrinkage really messed with some of the icons. DFZ The Kane Chronicles Glorantha (Tabletop RPG)

★ O c t o b e r ★

Two posts this month—but one of those was just a resized edition of my DoS icons from February. The other was of covers & illustrations for the Dark Crystal YA book series; I liked the art, but had trouble with scanning artifacts in my iconning. Dreaming of Sunshine (Discord size) The Dark Crystal YA Novels

★ N o v e m b e r ★

Two posts this month—both done on request for a friend, again. It was interesting doing icons for topics—I wouldn't have thought of doing Film Noir femme fatales otherwise, for example! Although I suspect I may have matched rachelmanija's requested Sunset Boulevard dialogue to the wrong characters in at least some of the icons. Ah, well; text practice is good... (And I did like the visual pun in that center icon! ... it exists because there was an awkwardly placed text box that I couldn't paint over.) Batch 1 Batch 2

★ D e c e m b e r ★

I spent most of December preoccupied by Yuletide, but did sneak in one icon post right at the end of the month. I've always loved the covers Kinuko Craft did for Patricia McKillip's fantasy novels—so gorgeous, so distinctive; I could always pick out McKillip's books in the library by those covers—but the overwhelming detail made iconning difficult. So much gets lost in the shrinkage! (That center icon was the one I did the most work on—I wanted to use the cover's border as the border for the icon—but the detail issues mean that in the finished icon the border is almost imperceptible.) Kinuko Craft (Patricia McKillip covers)

★ 2 0 2 0 ★

... Yes, I did choose my final nine icons to color-coordinate with each other as well as to give an overview of the year. I want my end-of-year summary to be pretty all together! I'm not sure that "progress" makes sense as a description of this year, honestly—it was periods of lethargy and bursts of energy, iconwise. Which is my general pattern! But this year was a bit extreme. I do think I got better with text, though! I'm proud of that. And I did a few ambitious icons (the Non Square Shapes with their borders—especially this one, which is full color surrounded by sepia, surprisingly hard to get right—and the "symmetrical" Mucha icons) that I think turned out very well. (I have a Best of Icons nom thread, and have been interested to see what others pick out from my work.)

★ R e s o l u t i o n s ★

I hereby renew my pledge to complete my Dani Moonstar megapost. I know this becomes less believable every year... Anyway! I would like to keep working on text; I think I've made a lot of progress and I would like to keep doing that! In addition, I'd like to work on iconning very detailed images (like those Kinuko Craft covers and Kalin Kadiev Glorantha illustrations). A lot of my efforts lost detail to the point of looking squashed or blurry; it's an area where I think I could definitely improve. Previous years: 2017, 2018, 2019