kerravonsen | Gratuitous Icon Ramble (Reply)

Here are all the icons I entered in the tardis_icons challenge #25; I only posted four of the five over at ka_iconage because I wanted to keep the last one for myself. So I decided I'd do an abbreviated post over there, and do a full ramble about them here.

There were three challenges this time; one screencap challenge, and two "creative" challenges. I did fantastically well this time! Three places!

Screencap challenge. There were a lot of entries for this one, about twice as many as for the "creative" challenges. The votes were very spread, it was hard to pick a favourite. Mind you, the one that won the "best use of screencap" was a standout winner, and you could see why, because it combined three of the screencaps into one image in a very creative way.

	Rose: Faith I think this one looks rather pretty... though one could argue about the caption.
	10th Doctor in a coma Rose touching the fevered brow of the 10th Doctor. I was trying for a sort of "miniature painting" look. This one is textless because it looked better without text. This tied for "Most creative/unique"! The one that tied with it was very creative with its caption, it makes me smile even now.

Creative Challenge #1: "boxes". You had to use boxes in your icon, whether they were the caps themselves or other layers. I was very happy that the one I liked best in this one, won. It was very pretty, in shades of purple and blue, with a nice sort of gradation with the boxes (I wonder how they got that effect?). The other entries ranged from ugly to quite nice; some were just juxtaposed boxes, others were good with the blending, others were sharp but overlapping.

Sycorax: Like Bricks Don't
The Sycorax spaceships hung in the air like bricks don't (yes, it's a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference). I just couldn't resist, it was the first thing I thought of when I was trying to think of something where I could have multiple source-images in the same icon. It won the "Mod's Choice"!

9th Doctor: Eh?
Since the subject-matter for this section of the challenge was wide open, I decided I'd do something on my list of "icons I want to make for me to use"; and one of them was an "Eh?" icon. (

vilakins has a nice Vila one, I wanted one too). I can't remember if I decided on the "Eh?" before or after I found the screencap of the Doctor looking confused from "Aliens of London"; I think I found the cap first, while I was looking for a "milestones" image. The "Rose" part of this was from the screencap before, when she makes the suggestion which makes him look so boggled. I did one version of this, in a large size, and it looked horrible shrunk, so I started again from scratch, but still with the general idea of using boxes decoratively overlapping, with clear, clean lines.
And after all that, this won "Most creative/unique"! Yay!

Creative Challenge #2: "milestones". This one was thematic, you had to show a "milestone" in the New Who series. There was one entry which was the stand-out winner in "most creative/unique" and it certainly deserved it, it was an amusing animated Dalek icon. The one that won the "best milestones" icon was... another Dalek icon. (gee, there seems to be a pattern...)

Rose: Not in Kansas anymore
Rose's first trip in the TARDIS, and if you don't get the "Wizard of Oz" reference, I'll wonder what century you're from! I was experimenting with a "difference" layer and with angled borders... I'm not sure if it ended up being too busy or too plain. I did one version which had faint "particle trace" images over it, and kept on tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and finally decided it looked better plain.