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.
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Date: 2007-08-30 04:29 pm (UTC)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.