1wonderment | 2019 Progression Post

October

After 10 or so years of not really making any graphics, let alone icons, I returned to the icon community. Most of the communities I had been a part of were no longer around, so I ended up joining a lot of new communities. I joined

elitesimplicity and

movielims along with some stock and fandom icontest communities.

At first, I went back to my usual iconning style: prepping the base (base layer, base on screen, base on soft light with a high pass filter), adding a levels layer if necessary, then doing most of my coloring with photo filters, selective coloring, and textures. But my first challenge at

elitesimplicity changed that. The theme was neon, and I don't usually do bright or bright/unnatural coloring, so the challenge was a bit out of my comfort zone. After jumping that hurdle, I decided to play around with my compositions a little more.

I also started back at

narnia20in20 and tried a color palette theme. I had never tried iconning based on a specific coloring palette. I found that I rather liked it and ended up joining a few color-inspired communities on Livejournal and Dreamwidth. I also tried to improve how I did text in my icons. It's always been a bane of mine, and I hardly ever was satisfied with any of my icons that had text on theme, especially looking back at them years later.

I also joined

disney20in20 and got back into making icons from 2D animated films and TV series. I had only dabbled in that genre when I had left LJ. I ended up searching a lot of tutorials to get a better grasp at how to color those types of icons better.

November

November saw me get back into simple animated icons. Thank goodness for

icon_tutorial! I tried several different techniques such as moving letters (1st icon, top row) and mini movies (middle icon in the bottom row). Most of my old animated icons were just candles, snow, and rain.

I also experimented with adding textures in between my base prep layers. The first instance of this experiment happened purely by accident and turned out to be one of my favorite icons (middle icon in the top row).

I also tried to do more negative space icons that required a lot of cutting. In the past, I cut the screencap or image after I resized it, but after looking at some Q&A from past years, I started to cut the original image first before resizing. I think my negative space icons have a more clean, crisp look compared to the ones I made before.

Toward the end of the month, I began to experiment with a little more complex compositions (3rd icon in the bottom row).

December

I didn't get to icon as much in December because of the holidays and deadlines for projects. However, I managed to squeeze out three posts, lol!

December, I think, was mostly an experimentation with different textures and layers as well as complex compositions.

Goodbye, 2019