12 Buffy season eight icons

[locker_monster]

Was suddenly in the mood to make some Buffy icons. The icons cover issues 1, 2, 3, and 6. Vague spoilers.

Teaser:
     

01	02	03
04	05	06
07	08	09
10	11	12

Comments

[catalyst2.livejournal.com]

Wow, what a great set, every one of them. I'm grabbing the lot. Thanks

[locker-monster.livejournal.com]

Thanks! They were definitely fun to make. Comics are such a differnt medium from T.V.

[newnumber6.livejournal.com]

Some nice work there.

[locker-monster.livejournal.com]

Thanks. :-) But you know what I found? Making icons from comics is a lot harder. If you want to include the speech ballons you really can't because shrinking the image down to 100x100 makes it hard to read. I ended up cutting and pasting speech balloons so they'd fit.

You make some awesome animated comic icons. Any tips? The one of Buffy and Xander looks so simple but I had hoped to line up the images a little better.

[newnumber6.livejournal.com]

Speech bubble are always a pain, yeah. I do pretty much the same as you do - shrink the picture, cut and paste the speech bubble (which usually has to be shrunk some too, but only enough so that it remains readable). Leaving in as much corner-space (assuming that's where it goes) in the basepic as you can helps (which lets you cut off two sides of the bubble and potentially make it larger in the process... also, with a corner square, it's easier to use the new speech balloon cover up the original one from the base pic, without leaving odd overlaps. I try to do what I can to erase the original balloons from icons wherever possible, even if that means doing minor cut and pasting on the art).

In extreme cases I've sometimes had to cut and paste individual words and place them in the bubble in a way that makes them fit better and still be readable. (Or of course, there's always the option of making an animated icon with the only thing changing being the words in the bubble).

As to the Buffy/Xander icon, I haven't seen the base pics... sometimes it's just not possible to line things up very easily though, because the panels are to small or slightly off from each other. But it looks a little like, if it were possible, you needed to pull out a little more, to give room for Xander's head to fly off but still be in panel while you had buffy's body in both pics lined up with each other.

[newnumber6.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I'm not sure what you're using as your editing program, but I find the skew tool is helpful in making the pointy-to-the-mouthy part of the speech balloon (I'm sure it has a more technical term, but I can't recall it) still point to the mouth after a copy/paste thing. Select just that part, then use skew, and do what you can until it points towards the mouth. In the icons I see here this isn't really a problem with any of them (the willow 'I'd like to test that theory' doesn't have one at all, but I don't even know for sure if she was supposed to be the one speaking), so maybe you know that already, but just in case it wasn't a factor in any of the ones you've had to do I figured I'd pass on the tip since it took me a few tries to get that one.

[locker-monster.livejournal.com]

Actually, the speech bubble in the Willow icon did have the point and I attempted to make it smaller in Photoshop but then I just gave up and completely cut it out. I found it got in the way so now it looks a bit strange, but you get the basic idea.

With the Buffy/Xander icon the frames weren't exactly the same. In the second frame the position of Buffy and Xander had moved and the image had pulled back a bit. It was like the actors had moved between cuts. I suppose I could have spent more time on it, but it looks good enough. :-D