rpanons | I'm bad at this

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rpanons is an anonymous community for role-play related topics. This place serves as a forum for game discussions, canon discussions, RP solicitations (ATP, game ads, open memes), and advice. The occasional off topic comment is inevitable, but please keep heated social and political topics to their respective communities. Posting them here will only get them frozen. Subsequent threads made to bypass a freeze will then be deleted.

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how do you decide what kind of pictures you icon?

it's not blurry or pixelated and there's some kind of expression, be it facial or in body language

not being hideously dark is nice too, i'm not great at brightening

can you see the character's face?

is the image large enough and of a good enough resolution that you can crop it down to just the character's face plus some of their chest without it getting pixelated or blurry?

is the expression a clear one? happy, sad, annoyed, angry?

is the expression one that my current icon inventory is missing, or is this image a better example of an expression i already have an icon for?

for other icons, is the action clear? is it obvious that she's stabbing a vampire, or that he's polishing his glasses, or will it be hard to tell when the image is cropped and shrunk down?

I icon all of them, and use the best ones.

I don't get paid accounts, so I try for expressions that can be interpreted multiple ways and could be used for a variety of tags. I also try to make sure my icons aren't all headshots and have varying compositions, so that the set isn't same-y. I do get dissatisfied with some icons, when I realize it looks more pixelated on a larger computer than my laptop or if I feel like I don't have an icon that can properly express a certain mood my character regularly conveys in canon, so I'll redo some of them over the weekend.

I am usually satisfied with using google for stills and sometimes gifs (sometimes, because they can look weird when made into stills), but, if I absolutely want an expression from a scene that doesn't have stills or gifs, I'll go on youtube, make the video window as small as possible, and prep to hit printscrn at the right time. It's tedious, but the results are worth it.

If I really dislike the color-scheme or contrasts of an icon, I'll toggle with its color balance and levels on gimp (a free image editing program).

I don't get paid accounts, so I try for expressions that can be interpreted multiple ways and could be used for a variety of tags. I also try to make sure my icons aren't all headshots and have varying compositions

This is pretty much how I try to do it. Not having paid accounts forces to be creative. I often have one very close crop and one far crop, and also one where the character's face is not shown. Sometimes I sacrifice an image with a better expression just to have an icon with different clothing.

Whatever I drew that doesn't look completely terrible...

........

And then a lot of the shitty ones too because I hate to be cool.

depends on what I'm iconning

almost anything: is there a good expression/crop/colouring/otherwise visually appealing icon to be made from the cap? icon

hannibal: can you tell which character is in frame? icon, for the love of god

I'm bad at this

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