Errant Story Avatars

[Imp-Chan]

As some of you might remember, once upon a time people had a whole bunch of custom ES avatars on the old board. For some time now, I've been wanting to expand on this idea a bit, and do a couple of things.

1) Offer a gallery of fan-made ES and EN avatars for general use here on the board.
2) Collect all such fan-made ES and EN avatars in one handy location (this thread for now, eventually an actual gallery).
3) Encourage the creation of lots and lots MORE ES and EN avatars, because they are fun and would be neat for LJ and so forth.

So, that's what this thread is for. Got an ES avatar? Cool, please post it here. Want to make an ES avatar? Cool, please post it here. Want to find an ES avatar? Why not check here! And so on. I anticipate this being an activity full of fun and hilarity for all concerned.

Have at!

^-^'

Edit: And now we have a page up on the main site, collecting the avatars posted here: http://www.errantstory.com/avatars.php

[Graybeard]

As some of you might remember, once upon a time people had a whole bunch of custom ES avatars on the old board. For some time now, I've been wanting to expand on this idea a bit, and do a couple of things.

1) Offer a gallery of fan-made ES and EN avatars for general use here on the board.
2) Collect all such fan-made ES and EN avatars in one handy location (this thread for now, eventually an actual gallery).
3) Encourage the creation of lots and lots MORE ES and EN avatars, because they are fun and would be neat for LJ and so forth.

So, that's what this thread is for. Got an ES avatar? Cool, please post it here. Want to make an ES avatar? Cool, please post it here. Want to find an ES avatar? Why not check here! And so on. I anticipate this being an activity full of fun and hilarity for all concerned.

Have at!

^-^'

This sounds like a lot of fun, but to get it started, could you (or maybe Jim) give us a brief "ES Avatars for Dummies" tutorial? Personally, I'm not proficient with avatar construction (the one I use is lifted from Real Life and I could never have designed it from scratch), and don't have a clue as to how to make one like, say, yours. A brief technical how-to -- allowing lots of room for innovation and creativity, to be sure -- might get this off to a good start.

[Imp-Chan]

*blinks*

Okay... first, decide what you want your avatar to be. As an example, let's use the adorable child Ian picture from this comic: http://www.errantstory.com/comic.php?date=2007-11-09

Download the comic you want (for this purpose, we really don't much mind so long as it's not abused, and you can even use excerpts from your favorite wallpapers if you like), and open it in some sort of image editor. I use photoshop, but that could be just me.

Use the crop tool (or the select function), to select the area of the image that you want to turn into an avatar. Either crop the image down to just the area you want, or copy the area you want and paste it into a new file. Either will work.

If you want to make further changes to the image (in my example, I'm going to take out the corner of a speechbubble), do that next. In my case, I'm going to just use the magic wand to select everything that isn't Ian, and fill it in with white. It's just an example, so I'm not going to do anything more to it, but theoretically you could add text or color it or whatever in Photoshop.

Once you're done fussing with it, I usually resize my avatar images to be exactly 100 px by 100 px. You can do that with the Image Size function in Photoshop. Then I save it for the web.

Voila! With and without text:



^-^'

[Graybeard]

Thanks. Actually, this part of it --

Download the comic you want (for this purpose, we really don't much mind so long as it's not abused), and open it in some sort of image editor.

-- answers my question. I wasn't clear on whether a download was considered fair game (or even legal) here. From that point on, things are clear.

[Viking-Sensei]

Technically, since it's Baby Ian, shouldn't his caption be "I will do it!" since he probably hasn't done it yet?

Also, would anyone like to see a "Toon Ellis" and/or "Toon Rape-Kun" avatar in FwF style?

[Shane S.]

Dear god, this made me want to break open the GAIA Online account and make an Errant Story avatar.

[Graybeard]

Dear god, this made me want to break open the GAIA Online account and make an Errant Story avatar.

Well, somebody has to be the first. So go for it.

[Vavrek]

Since I'm bored and awake, I have reactivated my ancient powers of crop and resize.



Tada! It's everyone's favorite Pope! I chose this image nearly at random, but I think it's a good headshot and example of Poe's work.

More to come later, I hope.

[DarkIntruder]

Well, I was bored, and realized that I really don't have an original avatar that isn't generically copied from somewhere else. I will eventually have to remedy the situation, but for the moment , evil Sarine will have to do. And no, I am not at all self-conscious about having a female as my avatar, afterall, it's only temporary.

In the meantime, I made other avatars.

Starting with Sarine's "I'm going to eat your children!" expression from today's comic.



Now it's everyone's favorite PokeGod.



And that's it for now.


Edit: Forget about me having the Sarine avatar. Apparently the file size is just slightly over 15kb, so it won't let me use it, even though the size is 100X85. Oh well.

[Viking-Sensei]

*Ahem*

Don't say I nevah did nuttin' for ya.