Icon Meme-age

[niko]

From jojosimco ...

Audience participation is optional but the mememememe is as follows:

1. Reply to this post saying "ME! ME! ME!", and I will pick five of your icons.
2. Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose.
3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.
4. This will create a never-ending cycle of icon squee.

My icons are all pretty straightforward because I mostly make them myself as a need arises.  They also tend to be anime-based, because anime is a helluva lot easier to get a decent icon by doing a simple crop-and-resize, which is about the limit of my graphical abilities. :)

 

Nami from One Piece
Heh... this one is actually about due to be retired, I think.  It was my default journal icon for quite a while.  I was really gung-ho on One Piece at the time of one of my journal redesigns and this image appealed to me.  One Piece is usually a very bright, cartoony sort of series, so the gray-scale and the melancholy and the more "realistic" character design all pinged for me.

I do have a different icon for general "One Piece" conversation, so she probably won't get used much anymore, now that she got bumped from the journal's main slot.

Madoka from Kimagure Orange Road
Isn't she pretty?  :)  This was one of the first icons I ever used, and it's still one of my favorites.  I don't have any special connection to the character herself (except that she's sort of iconic and universally-loved)... but I just love the sketchy/brushy sort of art-style and the vividness of that teal color in her eyes and the background.  I also have a thing for this sort of 3/4-bust, off-center composition, and she's posed perfectly for it, with the tilt of her head and the angle of her shoulder

Hee! This is my newest icon, and I'm quite fond of it.  I like that the image can stand alone as a sort of impressionistic artwork, so I can use it as a general conversation icon...  but it has a little extra resonance for me, because *I* know it's actually a screenshot from a sweet OTP moment in an anime I love that no one else has paid much attention to.


Finally decided I needed a podfic icon, and this is the (rather unsubtle) result.  I just put "headphones" and "anime" into a google image search, and picked this girl because she was cute, cropped well, and was holding a convenient album cover that I could slap the word "Podfic" over. :)

Ugh.  My one attempt at something beyond crop and resize, and it kinda sucks.  I keep meaning to go back and have another go at it.

I love that shot of Ezra - the hat and the over-the-shoulder look and... *guh*.  The screenshot I got from my stupid PC was not very good, so I was going for kind of an old-timey newspaper sort of feel to make the graininess a feature, not a flaw... but it's just not crisp enough.

Still, it's my only Ezra icon right now, and one must have one of those. :)