Boring stuff and icon giveaway

[pensnest]

Much travelling about the country of late - aside from the *two* trips to retrieve Bun and her mountain of Stuff from Bristol, in the past seven days we've been to the universities of Bath, Nottingham and York, with Surrey tomorrow and UEA (Norwich) on Friday. Sigh. Still, it has been - hollow laughter - bright and sunny! In fact, I'm sitting here melting, even though it FUNDERED earlier and I thought the heat might dissipate... I've also been dashing hither and thither getting panto stuff ready - had to go into London to buy a script (sigh) and then into darkest Hertfordshire to deliver scripts to our director. It's a jungle out there. Sort of. Anyway, something has gone right, for a change, as I now *have* the scripts for Thursday's read-through.

I have a new, um, thingy. It looks like a miniature radiator and it holds 550 gb. Hee! Beast is doing Useful Things with it.

Went to a rather lovely concert on Saturday night, second half was Karl Jenkins' The Armed Man which I like enormously, and which was sung very well. The percussion was a mite overbearing, though. It took place in a church, nice acoustic for the first half - a selection of folk songs by Holst and Britten, with or without orchestral accompaniment - but really, for TAM it would have been nice to have the drums tucked away in a pit, or something. Still, a very good concert. Tring Choral Society, if I remember rightly.

In between all the dashing about I have been unable to write anything coherent but have been playing with icons. Textures and stuff, and even a brief foray into Actions, and Layer Sets! Oo-er. I have no idea if anyone will want to use any of the following, but if you fancy any, please help yourself. If you want to add text to the textless ones, go ahead. Credit is nice, comments are much appreciated.

The icons are sorta like these:



First, fizzy pop.

1		2		3
4		5		6
7		8		9
10		11

Then, blue.

1		2		3
4		5		6
7		8		9

These were done using a texture set from awmpdotnet, an awesome icon resources journal.

1		2		3
4		5		6
7		8		9

Comments

[ravenbat.livejournal.com]

oh those are so great! I can't snag any right now, but I'd like to come back and snag some at a later date, if you don't mind that is.

[pensnest]

Not at all - they'll still be here. :-)

[quiet000001.livejournal.com]

Hey. Sounds like you're pretty busy, but any plans to go see the new Pirates of the Carribean movie when it's out? Or interest in doing so? :)

[pensnest]

I definitely want to see it - um, d'you know when it's out? I missed the X-Men 3 movie altogether by being vague. After the rigours of this week, things should get easier. Though I'm away the following weekend. Thinks: I need a week in bed, preferably a *cold* week.

[turps33.livejournal.com]

Man, you really have been busy!

The fizzy pop icons are amazing! I'm going to take #1.

Thank you!

[pensnest]

Glad you like them - I took a picture of a glass of lemonade, as it looked so pretty.

[lazydwarf.livejournal.com]

Would I be terrible if I took #6 from the two last sets? Trickyfish, yay!

[pensnest]

I really like the way those Trickyfish ones have come out, too.

[vaudevilles.livejournal.com]

Ooh panto! Much fun (even if also much hassle).

And yummy icons.. snagging #6 of the texture set because the world (well me anyway) needs more trickyfish iconses.

[pensnest]

Woe for me, I'm one of the non-panto faction in our singing group... but it *should* be on the way to being sorted, very soon.

More trickyfish is always good.

[ephemera-pop.livejournal.com]

that's an awful lot of ground to cover! It's a real shame you missed Avenue Q on Friday - it's excellent, and I needed someone to confirm that one of the puppeteers really looked like Jessie - it ewas disconcerting!

[Um, Blue #3 m,ay be the perfect Joey Summer icon - may I? *takses*]

[pensnest]

Groan - at least Guildford isn't far - we got back about half an hour ago, although we set off horribly early.

Yeah - most annoying to have missed Avenue Q, but Bun reckons we should drag the menfolk along with us, so I'll try to get round to booking for us all.

[turloughishere.livejournal.com]

I feel for you having to scurry around like that in this heat! Are you done with the cross-country adventuring now? It certainly sounds like you need a nice & quiet and above else relaxing week or so.

Thingy? (Yes, I'm always interested in computer related stuff, I'm terribly nerdish like that :-)

I really must take the time and energy to investigate awmpdotnet! I definitely like the batch of icons you've made with that texture set. I'm snagging the Chris, JC, Lance, and Trickyfish icons, if you don't mind me being greedy :-)

PS What are Actions? Something you can do with the newest versions of Photoshop I know, but what? I probably can't do it in PS Elements anyway, but it would be nice to know...

[pensnest]

We have Norwich on Friday, and then a rest (except that I'm driving to the wild northern wastes to see turps33 the following weekend, yay!), but the Boy has also expressed an interest in Warwick, so there may be another trip this summer.

Actions... in PS CS, there's an Actions menu under the Windows header menu; you can record a set of moves to repeat on successive files. I recorded part of the bubbly icons above, so - duplicate base three times and set blending modes, add desaturation layer, add bubble texture layer. Play Action. At that point I had to stop because masking over the faces is different on each one, but it saved some time. (Though duplicating a Layer Set of the desaturation+bubbly+text layers would also be a shortcut.) I've only used the Actions once before, when saving a big batch (the Victoriana ones), but it was quite handy here. I wouldn't want to use Actions for making individual icons, I think I need to consider each stage separately, somehow.

I know awmpdotnet makes much more use of actions, because there are actually some shareable Actions on that journal! It seems like a cheat to use someone else's steps to make an icon, though, particularly since I usually make icons for contests, so I haven't downloaded those.

Oh, the 'Thingy' is a LaCie super-duper megadrive of some kind, *lots* of file storage space, plus it'll facilitate the 'handover' when I get the Beast's G5. (He's lusting after an Intel-equipped Mac now.)

[turloughishere.livejournal.com]

So that's what Actions are. I think I now understand why some of the batches of Backstreet icons I've seen lately have been so very uneven in quality. If you only crop the pictures, sharpen them, and then slap on the same Action on every one without tweaking for individual differences in colour, lighting etc. it stands to reason that not all icons will look as good. A handy tool if used right but definitely smacking of cheating and carelessness when used wrong. I think I'm actually kind of glad that Elements doesn't have them. It means I won't be tempted into abusing them. I mean, I already feel a little like I cheat when I drag-and-drop coloured layers from one icon to another but mostly I end up having to tweak them anyway. It just saves me the step of actually having to create them again and again.

[pensnest]

Yes, I agree. Even if it's just that different subjects have different hair colour, you still have to take into account the individual quirks of each crop. It's like all those colouring tutorials on icon_tutorial, there's no point applying the same steps to a completely different picture - you have to see what the picture actually needs. And it does feel a bit like cheating, when making a whole bunch of icons is so quick...

Besides, I kinda like the fiddling to tweak each little bit of an icon into the right place!

[catviret.livejournal.com]

Er, I'm snagging fizzy pop 1 to 5, because I am greedy!

Whee icons :D