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All right, so as of now, there will be no more crossposting to LJ. One of these days, I will go through my LJ and delete all my extremely personal crap. Everything else will stay up. All my content has been imported to DW, so I'm not losing anything. I feel good about this way of handling it, so yay. Thanks to everyone who gave input!
I've been talking to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tinny about icons, and because I was stuck on my fic, and quite enjoyed the new Doctor Who episode, I made some 10x01 icons.
Crit, feedback, comments, all welcome!
Has anyone been watching Line of Duty? I'm mostly watching it for Paul Higgins, who played Jamie on The Thick of It. His English accent is painful. He's trying so hard, but as someone on my dash on Tumblr said, it's like watching undercover Jamie acting like he imagines Englishmen act. His character on Line of Duty is an UTTER CREEP, though, so I'm having some discomfiting dissonance with how much I love Jamie and how much I hate ... I think his name is Hilton? ACC Hilton. Blech.
Thandie Newton is playing the lead, though, and she's great. I had a huge crush on her back when she was playing Dr. Carter's girlfriend on ER. Her character on Line of Duty is a bit shady, but man, I know where my sympathies lie. Everyone else on that show is even more of a creep. Oh, gritty British crime shows.
I've been talking to
tinny about icons, and because I was stuck on my fic, and quite enjoyed the new Doctor Who episode, I made some 10x01 icons.| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
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Crit, feedback, comments, all welcome!
Has anyone been watching Line of Duty? I'm mostly watching it for Paul Higgins, who played Jamie on The Thick of It. His English accent is painful. He's trying so hard, but as someone on my dash on Tumblr said, it's like watching undercover Jamie acting like he imagines Englishmen act. His character on Line of Duty is an UTTER CREEP, though, so I'm having some discomfiting dissonance with how much I love Jamie and how much I hate ... I think his name is Hilton? ACC Hilton. Blech.
Thandie Newton is playing the lead, though, and she's great. I had a huge crush on her back when she was playing Dr. Carter's girlfriend on ER. Her character on Line of Duty is a bit shady, but man, I know where my sympathies lie. Everyone else on that show is even more of a creep. Oh, gritty British crime shows.
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THAT'S where I know him from. I kept wondering! Watching British TV is always an exercise in "I know you from SOMEWHERE but am I invested enough to IMDB you ..." Though I can't say, tbh, that I remember what his role in A2A was. I did watch the show, but I barely remember the plot ... I was more a Life on Mars kinda person.
I like watching it
Oh, I love it. I enjoy British TV's tendency to be like, well EVERYONE sucks and is a terrible person, so you're just going to have to pick whom to side with based on your personal sympathies.
I'm also enjoying this season's theme of pointing out systemic misogyny, and how putting a police department in charge of investigating police corruption can't really work in the long run, because you're going to get the same systemic failures in the anti-corruption department that you also get in all other departments--except nobody's investigating them.
Though I'm not sure the show's being obvious enough about pointing that out. I got this anon on Tumblr yesterday, and it did kind of throw me. How could anyone argue she was not justified in defending herself??
Poor Gene. I still don't know whose idea it was to put him in charge of ferrying cops into the afterlife. That's such an abstract concept, and Gene and abstract concepts are just a bit antithetical.
Re icons
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I think one of the main difficulty in icon making is that it's almost impossible to make a good icon without using the lasso tool (this thing) to separate your subject from the background. The only icon of the ones above that I didn't do that with is #6, and you can tell--it's not particularly well-lit, and the subject is hard to make out. For me, that icon was mostly an experiment, but I'd say it failed. ;)
The idea is to crop out your subject (usually a person, or a face; in #5 above it was Bill, Twelve, and the desk) and then either stick it onto a new background and blend the two, or to use filters like brightness, levels, curves, etc to change the lighting and colors of the subject and the background to create a good icon-look.
If I were you, I'd go and look for general GIMP tutorials on cropping with the lasso tool, on working with multiple layers, on blending modes (aka layer modes), color and lighting filters, and color and image correction tools such as levels, color balance, curves, and saturation adjustment. Sounds like a lot, but once you know your way around those tools, you should have no trouble getting into icon making--which is kind of an art of its own, because graphic design rarely requires you to work on a tiny 100x100 pixel canvas. So most fandom tutorials don't deal with graphic design basics, and more with "okay so how do I make tiny images look good?".
Good luck! If you want more info, check out the art tutorial tag on
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You cannot know because a proper fannish update is still in the works :) It will be posted at the end of the month, time willing. To asnwer: it's Quentin Tarantino films, particularly the alternative histories ( Django Unchained , Inglourious Basterds ), where I have grown particularly fond of Christoph Waltz's characters *points at icon* Since I am a history geek, I'm thinking up background stories and AUs like crazy, but the fandom...is more classical celebrity fandom than transformative, so I hope to have better luck engaging here (even with people who are not fans of these canons) than over there (there's people who find my meta interesting but they never engage and I find that boring? Same with the constant repetition of picture posts of actors I like with just "They are So handsome/hot!!!". Even when I agree...it gets boring after a while?)
Sorry for the rant... I am still suffering from culture shock, I guess *wry smile*
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I hear you on the lack of transformative content on other fandom platforms. It's what's driven me back to DW, too--canon can be fun, but the reason I'm in fandom is not because I love the canon content so much. Fanon > canon, always! The hot actors are all nice and well, but yeah, there are only so many pictures of Peter Capaldi making a weird face I can look at before I lose interest ...
Re: Re icons
If you want to join the iconmaker community on DW, head on over to
Almost all iconmakers are still on LJ, and almost nobody is here. We welcome everyone with open arms.
GIMP is a good choice to get into iconmaking. It's a great tool and can do everything you need to make icons.