Icon Progression 2022

[sheliak]

★ J a n u a r y ★

My first icons of the year were made on request for Wild Violets, an apparently very bad book that I have not read. I really like the concept of the skeleton one, but I think it would've worked better with smaller text—I've got a habit of making text as big as I can fit, and this one needed more space, I think. I also did some icons of the Masks of the True Gods from a Glorantha tabletop RPG module, as well as a lot of Sienkiewicz X-Men sketches, mostly but not entirely for the round. That's why the rabbit-mask is positioned like it is—if I'd let it fill the icon space the ear tips would be cut off in a style that displays icons as circles. (I enjoy the challenge of making a square image look good when you can only see the circle section of it.) I also sort of made gestures towards a Tigress Queen megapost that never happened, but only gestures. Wild Violets Masks of the True Gods X-Men, Thomas Canty, Arthuriana, Misc

★ F e b r u a r y ★

This month I didn't do a whole lot of icons, but some of them were complicated! The Pyro icon used flame textures made transparent and layered over paper ones for a burning effect—not sure that worked, but I'm glad I played around with it. Rachel there was a black-and-white drawing; I colored her in using textures, some of which I tweaked the colors on. And the frog was actually pretty tricky—I ended up copy-pasting a section of leaf to give him a better background. X-Men & misc

★ M a r c h ★

This month I did more round icons—I was thinking of Gold Leaf, a theme I think is gorgeous but will never use because too many of my icons are squares and screwing up my old entries would make me sad. Some of the images I keep coming back to, like that clawed hand. Also experimented a bit with the masks—that one I tried drawing eyes in. A bit of hubris on my part! (One of the icons in the linked post is NSFW, though you kind of have to squint to tell.) Misc

★ A p r i l ★

This month I did a mix of things—teaser art for Six Ages: Lights Going Out, runes (I keep coming back to runes...), some random photos. Six Ages, misc

★ M a y ★

This month, I made my second gif icon! (Ro from Monument Valley, using her different in-game models to color-lapse her cloak.) I worked hard! It has like a hundred frames! Some of the color transitions still don't look great. I might return to the idea sometime but for now I don't want to do all that work again. I did a bunch of Monument Valley still icons too, but thought I'd make a huge megapost with all my screenshots and, as usual, stalled out on that. (Iconning from my own screenshots was a new experience for me, though! Timing them right was hard. I'm still proud of catching the music note for that first one before it drifted away.) I also did icons with the King of Dragon Pass heroes and applicable runes—I used a fandom font for most of the runes, but got the rare ones from the Well of Daliath official site. (This is my latest of several ways to deal with KODP/Six Ages advisor portraits being so determinedly rectangular, which makes it challenging to get good square icons out of them. But I like runes, so...) I tried tweaking the art in that last one to give her a runic brooch; not completely satisfied with how that turned out. Monument Valley King of Dragon Pass

★ J u n e ★

As usual, I iconned my fic canon review—Angel's Egg and Star Wars : Republic. (Angel's Egg is a very confusing, very gorgeous movie. And despite some slight wonkiness with the hair, that first icon is one of my favorites all year—though I'd like to return to that set of screenshots and see if I can do it better in the future.) The Angel's Egg icon post joined the sketch and Monument Valley and Tigress Queen (and New Mutants, my god) ones in incompleteness—I had like five hundred screenshots. Lo and behold, I did not icon them all! The Star Wars ones (angriest padawan Zule Xiss and friends) I did in a hurry after realizing that none of my other posts would be done for the month. I do like some of them, but I also made some mistakes just due to being tired and in a hurry—that one half-body I should've recentered, but I forgot I could do that. (I'd been working with other scans where I couldn't do that because her whole body wasn't in the panel, but for this one I could've moved her to the right! I suspect it would have looked better. Not that I can be sure, becuase I also forgot to save the WIP file.) Star Wars: Zule Xiss & Padawan Pack

★ J u l y ★

July was mostly taken up by battleshipex (I wrote so much fic! and made art, somehow!). I iconned a bit of my fanart for the exchange, but couldn't post it at that point due to the exchange still being anon. So instead I made a tiny post of coyote icons so I'd have something to put up. Nichelle Nichols died at the end of the month, and I made a bunch of Uhura icons very quickly on request, but didn't post them publicly until later. Coyotes

★ A u g u s t ★

I polished up some of those Uhura icons, and made a few more. And posted them, right at the end of the month, along with some random other things. I used a Star Trek-looking font for the text! Kind of proud of that. Uhura & Misc

★ S e p t e m b e r ★

Woe and alas, I failed to make an icon post this month! However, date checking reveals that one of my Uhura icons (which I posted credited to August but technically went up in the wee hours of September 1) was in fact September 1. This strangely makes me feel better about the whole thing. Did too icon every month! Sorta.

★ O c t o b e r ★

I did not do very much iconning in October. Almost none. Which is why I'm showing two nearly identical icons—they're all I did! And the only technique I used was a bit of original-text use (that's the same font as in the original panel, just color-inverted and at a different relative size.) Birds of Prey (seriously, just those two icons)

★ N o v e m b e r ★

Three icons this time—two of them remakes/recolors of older icons. You've already seen them

★ D e c e m b e r ★

Again, I made very few icons this month—but I did, at the last minute, decide that having unfinished megaposts cluttering my desktop was silly. So I posted the rest of the year's icons as well. (At the time I wasn't exactly sure when I'd made them, but I went through and checked the file data for this post, so I'm pretty sure of the dates now.) Biggles & Worrals Monument Valley (made May) Angel's Egg (made June) Sienkiewicz X-Men (made January-March)

★ 2 0 2 2 ★

I thought I hadn't done a lot of icons last year, but actually I did—it's just that a) a lot of those were in would-be megaposts that I didn't post at the time and just let sit there in folders on my desktop, and b) I didn't get much done in the last few months of the year. But I actually did make a lot of nice stuff! And I have a Best of Icons thread.

★ R e s o l u t i o n s ★

Going forward, I think I'm going to try to break myself of the megapost habit. Those worked for me a few years ago, but these days I'm too busy, and working through a huge pile of screenshots or scans doesn't make me happy anymore. It's okay to just post what I have and revisit the subject matter later, when I actually feel like it! I'm really glad that I posted my Angel's Egg, Monument Valley, and X-Men icon posts before the year ended. I'd like to clear out my other piles of waiting-to-post icons as well. I've already made some progress by posting my old Dani Moonstar and Tigress Queen stuff; I'd like to get the other New Mutants icons up, and see if I've got anything else hanging around. Aside from that... I'd like to work more on text. I say that often, but I still need to work on the balance between "readable" and "leave some negative space". Previous years: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021