smallbatchicons | Member Posts

One good thing this school year is that all the full-time employees get one half "work from home" day a week under normal circumstances. This helps a lot with my general high fatigue, but it's a little unpredictable because there are a lot of circumstances that result in it being taken away temporarily.

I came home from work on Tuesday evening, took a shower, and immediately went to sleep without even drying my hair much.

I woke up around 2am and am gonna back to bed around 5am.

I am really frustrated with how sleepy and tired I am. Also, it's the time of the school year where - since I did some advance planning - I am not drowning in work backlog yet.

This makes it so I want to be creative, but after finishing with the posting of my last fic earlier this year, I just kind of don't feel a lot of motivation to keep going. When I wrote the Death Note fic, I had this whole series planned in mind, but I knew that it would be better to write a chapter fic that could stand alone or could spring into something else. And sure enough, writing all of it in advance made it so that by the end of posting, I wasn't as emotionally invested in it anymore. Having a more "professional" attitude toward fanwork seems to take a lot of the joy and dopamine out of it.

Even though I received a steady and healthy amount of feedback for that fic, I just kind of haven't felt like I knew what I wanted to do next since. Every now and then I feel the tiniest spark of a motivation to do something creative, but it never crystalizes into anything real. That's not to say that I'm not enjoying some fandom and private RP stuff, but I guess I just feel like my whole footprint as a person has shrunk down again.

I feel like a slug who's been salted, but it doesn't actually hurt that badly. Like, depression but not in the active sadness sense, I guess. It just feels weird to want private and personal time but to have no energy or motivation to do anything with it. I know I could tidy my apartment more, even though it's currently pretty livable, just needs some sprucing, but I have that resistance to only WORKING all the time.

Even being online lately, I don't have the same routine of websites or information to check. I am trying to be more active here since I know real people are around as users, but beyond that ????????

There's this lady named Taylor Black (not the first one that pops up if you search online) who's a pretty brunette influencer type whose primary posts seem to be reading and reacting to comments sections of other people's tiktoks/shortform videos. I have been enjoying her energy a lot, though. Parasociality seems to have a certain allure given my energy level, but then I feel sad that I don't really talk about anything of substance, even with the friends I do speak to every day.

Frustrated by how little of an effort my own father makes to talk to me regularly. I ask to, but then he doesn't meet me halfway or calls once a month when I'm asleep. We used to be SUPER close, and I know he loves me, but it still just feels like that social atrophy thing.

Current Mood: sleepy

thisbluespirit

Written for

no_true_pair September 1st (Mary Bennet & Zak Gist, 9 o'clock on a Saturday),

100fandoms, and

xoverbingo.

Angels Unaware (1093 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Other Bennet Sister (TV), Eternal Law (TV 2012)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Mary Bennet & Zak Gist
Characters: Mary Bennet, Zak Gist
Additional Tags: Mentioned Tom Hayward, Mentions of Mary Bennet/Tom Hayward, Pre-Canon, Post-Canon, Angels, Community: no_true_pair, community: xoverbingo, Regency, mentions of wordsworth, Chance Meetings, Crossover, Community: 100fandoms
Summary: Two unlikely good angels meet in the street, by chance.

tinny

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

yarnandglue

While I hate to conspiracy-monger or catastrophize, if you have signed up to vote by mail, you may wish to reconsider. As a friendly reminder, you can turn in your mailed ballots to an election judge at any election site OR by dropping them off in an official drop box and thus skip the mailing process :) Here is a central hub to find more info on your specific state.

falkner

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: anxious

dickinsons

So, I've been getting back into audio drama lately, after a friend asked for recs and I took a trip down memory lane, and I've been both listening to new-to-me ones and re-listening to classic ones I never actually managed to finish back in the day. I've just finished my Wooden Overcoats re-listen, which was important to me because it's always been one of my faves and I only stopped listening in the middle of season 4 back in 2022 (had been a fan since 2018) and I have THINGS TO SAY! About many things, but for now I want to focus on Antigone/Chapman for Reasons.

There'll be spoilers under the cut, you've been warned! But if you're curious, I truly recommend this audio drama with all my being. It's earnest, fun, emotional, beautifully directed and acted, with great sound design and a lovely set of characters.

And now for my SPOILERY Antigone/Chapman thoughts:

( Antigone/Chapman thoughts (SPOILERS) )

linky

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

Current Mood: creative

sheliak

The first row are submissions for

ic_animated Spin the Wheel 2.0; some of the others were made by for the challenge too, not all.

Fandoms include Transformers (IDW1, first Windblade miniseries), Monstress, The Power Fantasy, SCP Foundation, Dalemark; plus random art.

( 25 icons )

kaffy_r

Moving Pictures

I'm going to try to post video. It shows the entire audience singing "Arirang" a segment of which is part of "Body to Body," the opening song on their new album Arirang. "Arirang" is a folk song that is deeply rooted in Korean culture - so much so that the country's Japanese colonizers and oppressors forbade its singing. Putting it in their song was a way of telling the world that they are part of Korea, and proud to take its culture to the larger world.

Watch on YouTube

Current Location: the home office
Current Music: Ateez "Ice on My Teeth"

kaffy_r

BTS Concert Pics

I'd meant to put a couple of concert pictures and videos up yesterday, but I didn't manage to do that. I'll do that today. (No pictures of my couch buddies, because I haven't asked them for permission to post them outside our Comrfy Couch Discord server. But there are a couple of pics I took following the growth of the crowd as the sun slowly sank, and ARMY's programmable BTS light sticks (ARMY bombs, for the uninitiated), began to twinkle and shine in different colors.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: the home office
Current Music: Ateez "Ice on My Teeth"

flareonfury

Well fell asleep last night on the couch after trying to watch the latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and there was a power glitch. Everything came back on except for the internet and since I was on the couch with Xena and Gabby cuddled on top of me, I just played Dreamlight until I got super sleepy and fell asleep until early this morning. I was very comfortable between the two cats but bladder called and won.

Welp, if you told my younger self that I would ever icon Lana Lang, I'd probably would have laughed at you.... but well, I did it. But I did really love Superman & Lois' version of Lana a lot, maybe it was her writing or casting - I'm not quite sure. I really enjoyed making these icons, I'm proud at how well the textures came out with the cropping/images. And I just signed up/did the icons in the nick of time since the challenge ends September 1st.

Games

Dreamlight Valley apparently already had Lucky - but as a pet... which fine - that doesn't give me a lot of hope that they'd at least give us Perdita & Pongo like the Lady & Tramp plus the animals from the Lion King. I did finally get Maleficent though! Still haven't gotten to Aurora but maybe later this week or next. The game keeps glitching so I have to restart it a bunch.

Shows

My Adventures with Superman Season 3 ( Read more... )

Lanterns Season 1 (as of the first two episodes) ( Read more... )

X-Men '97 Season 2 ( Read more... )

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 so far ( Read more... )

Sterling Point Season 1 on Prime ( Read more... )

My Life With the Walter Boys Season 3 ( Read more... )

Ted Lasso Season 4 ( Read more... )

Anyway I think that's it as of right now - I need to go find my phone and then get ready for bed since it's after 11 already. So maybe next time will be a Supergirl and Spider-Man: Brand New Day review.... which would be good because I do want to watch them again anyway.

sheliak

The first 20 icons are my submissions to

itsabattlefield Summer Energy; the rest are a mix of challenge alts/rejects and other icons I did of the same fandoms while I was working on the challenge.

( 25x Transformers Prime, 13x The Narts, 11x Transformers: Combiner Hunters (IDW1), 9x Twelve Kingdoms, 3x Yuri's Palace, 2x Galaxy Princess Zorana, 2x Wind Child )

thisbluespirit

I have done the thing! Or at least, am mid-strategically-staggered promo-ing

xoverbingo, hurrah!

I made a rebloggable tumblr post here.

And, of course, the thing about making a comm like this, is I do have to put my money where my mouth is. Luckily, it should hopefully play well with

no_true_pair and

51pluscrossoverfandoms:

( Cut for my shiny card )

I think it's rather nice. I do like my own prompts, lol. (More seriously, the aim was to get a mix of general prompts, plus things that would enable crossover shenanigans, as well as others that could be useful from the fusion end. I wasn't sure about the conversation starters to begin with, but I think they work all right. (And they're optional anyway.)

Don't worry, I shall now only post about this in the usual way. Thanks to anyone who cast an eye over it for me earlier. <3

flareonfury

It's been awhile since I did a meme, so figured it was about time. Both memes were snagged from

impala_evolved.

This or That: Tropes addition. Feel free to copy/paste if you want to play!

slow burn or love at first sight // fake dating or secret dating // enemies to lovers or best friends to lovers // there’s only one bed or long-distance correspondence // hurt/comfort or amnesia // fantasy au or modern au* // mutual pining or domestic bliss // smut or fluff // canon-compliant or fix-it // reincarnation or character death// one-shot or multi-chapter // kid fic or road trip fic // arranged marriage or accidental marriage // high-school romance or middle-age romance // time travel or isolated together // neighbors or roommates // sci-fi au or magic au // body swap or gender bent // angst or crack // apocalyptic or mundane

*So I do like Modern AUs, it just kinda has to be certain fandoms? I know I really loved The 100's modern Bellamy/Clarke AUs. I've read a couple Bridgerton and Game of Thrones ones but lost interest usually. I guess it would depend on the fandom.
** I also still love: love at first sight, secret dating, best friends to lovers, amnesia (Overboard anyone? Also 10 Things That Never Happened which had fake!amnesia), and canon compliant (although most of my favorite ships are non-canon so yeah that doesn't usually work). I just love the other one more.

Dw history meme
When did you join Dreamwidth? June 14, 2009. I can't believe it's been seventeen years? That makes me feel old.

Why did you join Dreamwidth? Originally, it was sometime after dreamwidth came about and I think that was because of one the larger purges that LJ did back which honestly was one of the first or second big blows to LJ fandom spaces that I experienced - and I think it was the safer option and also most similar formatting that I loved about LJ compared to the other places people went to although I did end up joining tumblr.

What's the meaning behind your Dreamwidth username? same name as my LJ - wanted to it be seamless transition if anyone happened to want to find me from LJ. But anyway it has two meanings, the original name - flare on fury just squished together.... and the second one after I realized what it spelled Flareon Fury aka that fiery Eevee evolution from Pokémon. Which works! I love Flareon too. So basically a two-for-one deal.

What's your favorite thing about Dreamwidth? I have to say that it uses the system that LJ used (the journals/communities) and has improved on it. I much prefer this version of interaction than tumblr where I just feel like I'm lost in the abyss (I mean don't get me wrong pretty gifs/fanart, but it's just chaos to me) and things like Discord where I literally cringe at. There are a lot of events and communities.

What's your least favorite thing about Dreamwidth? Sometimes I feel alone in posting in communities and that I'm spamming people because of it since I'll look for new posts and I'm like the only person posting new. I've run a few Drabble-A-Thons and other events, and no one participated in which sucks.

Dreamwidth free, paid or premium? Paid so that I can have 150 icon slots! (and to support the site)

What do you get out of Dreamwidth that you don't get from anywhere else? I have to agree with what impala_evolved said "DW still moves slow enough for me to post comments a day (or more) later, and I can catch up on my reading page, and it's still searchable. And I can customize my own blog!!" I love LOVE being able to design my websites so I hate not being able to control how my journal/communities look although we did lose several really great layout communities that had been on LJ. I also love the tagging system.

Dreamwidth tip for beginners? I would say join communities for your various fandoms and keep the fandoms alive by interacting with those fandoms! Participate in fic events that interest you. Ship and Let Ship - do not shame people for shipping what they do. Also Your Kinks are Not My Kinks or however that saying goes - again do not shame people for their kinks. COMMENTING - so important! If you're not a writer or graphic maker - let them know you like it or comment in discussion posts - best way to keep the writers/graphic makers/fans keep the fandoms alive. Also if you have nothing on your blog currently, write a little about you section (can be broad and just be about the fandoms you like - doesn't have to be as in depth as mine) and snag some icons from

fandom_icons or the many other icon communities out there.

galadhir

So... my sword dance that I only just made up, which I intended to debut to a friendly audience for critique at Christmas, with the aim of presenting the finished version at our new Shimmyfest next June? That sword dance? I am dancing it at a hafla for a bunch of strangers on 5th September.

What was I thinking?!

Actually, Elizabeth had suggested that in order to drum up attendance at SparkleFens, we should be present at the other local haflas, so that they felt it was only fair to come to ours. Accordingly, when I heard about this one I couldn't help but volunteer.

I think I'm ready. I keep forgetting the dance, but I always do that and have to improvise something until I hit a bit I remember again. So I might as well embrace that as my process.

My outfit is ... 98% ready. I had a dress rehearsal yesterday, and found that the outfit is no trouble to dance in. However there's a bit - when I raise my hands above my head - where the bra rides up, and the black mesh leotard rides down at the front and there is a small gap between them at the middle of the front. That doesn't look good at all.

Accordingly I bought a large red rose, a 20cm length of black stretch mesh, and a half metre length of black velvet from the local haberdashery, with the idea that I could either hide the gap behind the rose, add an extra panel of mesh to the leotard's neckline, or have a velvet drape under the bra.

Then I sewed an extra panel of mesh onto the neckline and added the rose to the bra. Now I need to put everything back on and see if that has sorted the problem, or if I need the velvet drape as well.

The rose is not really goth enough - the red is too bright - but it was the best match they had. I will rub some charcoal into it until it looks like a better fit, and just hope I won't have to go out in the rain.

I had to have my dress rehearsal without music, because when I got to the dance studio it turned out I had left my phone at home. But at least I learned some stuff about the outfit, and in fact dancing the dance without music was probably harder than doing it with.

yuuago

Today I attended an Educational Nature Walk event. We went through the forest walking trails with a Cree elder and she told us about the various plants native to the area and what they can be used for. Even though we're heading toward the end of the season, there were still a lot of plants available to look through.

It was very interesting! I was aware that some local plants are edible, but I wasn't aware of the scope of uses. Obviously I'm not about to go making teas out of spruce needles, but it was still very interesting to learn about.

From what I remember, she mentioned that they do these walks at other times of year as well, so I might see if there are some next year that happen earlier in the season.

I'm very glad I went! Though it was a three-hour walk, so I ended up quite tired, haa.

kaffy_r

Decibels and Delight

It was the loudest concert I've ever attended. I've attended three Springsteen concerts, and none of them even approached the sound I heard Friday night.

It was also amazing, despite my occasional urge to clap hands over ears. I never did that, by the way, because I wanted to hear everything going on down on the immense four-armed BTS stage at Chicago's Soldier Field.

Amazing is such an overworked word, though. Breathtaking or astonishing are probably better. I'd add extraordinary, but from what I can glean from the ARMY members with whom I spent much of yesterday, it's not right, because every concert BTS puts on reaches the kinds of auditory and spiritual levels that I experienced.

And yes, I'm coupling auditory and spiritual, because - quite a bit to my own surprise - the sound attained a spiritual connection for me. That was obviously what happened with dedicated ARMY members. It wasn't something I expected to have happen within me.

It was what the group of men performing generated in their audience, their fans, their ARMY, that amazed me. When an estimated 70,000 people of all ages, all genders and all skin colors, could scream so loud my ears hurt as the night went on then turn around and sing together with the group they watched, it hit me hard. I didn't realize that until nearly the end of the concert, when they sang "Mikrokosmos."

That's a song from one of their 2019 EPs. It's a beautiful piece of music, and the lyrics speak about stars in the sky and people as stars; about people being there for each other and making each star shine even more brightly.

I found myself tearing up as I heard the entire stadium sing along, whether they knew the Korean words or not. That truly caught me by surprise and threw me off balance. Why did this hit me when I'd spent the rest of the evening simply appreciating the music and dance on an intellectual level?

Possibly because the entire night's performances had been creeping up on me all unnoticed, drawing me closer to some kind of emotional understanding that I'd been certain I wouldn't reach. What a surprise for someone who told her husband earlier this year that I was going as an expensive form of BTS research; for someone who quite deliberately insisted that I was not ARMY, nor would I ever be ARMY. I was so sure of all of that.

I'm still not quite sure what I am at the end of this one concert. But I can no longer confidently announce myself as someone simply doing research, or as someone who would never become ARMY.

As the king told Anna, it is a puzzlement. But it is a puzzlement that I'm very glad happened.

This is Mikrokosmos as it was recorded.

Watch on YouTube

To end on a completely mundane note (mundane, but not unexpected, considering it was me), I ended up walking from Soldier Field to the Chicago Loop, and it almost did me in. I think I temporarily lost at least a pound thanks to sweating on the journey. I might have done less of that had I taken off the windbreaker that was a gift all of us who were in the Soldier Field box had received from one of the day's organizers. I didn't, because there were so many little gifts from so many different ARMYs in one of its pockets that I was afraid I'd lose some of them if I just carried it haphazardly.

I managed to get to the Howard el at 12:35 a.m. without throwing up because of the heat, and I collapsed into bed. I was only half a person today because of my ridiculous decision to walk to an el stop. But I wanted that half to tell you at least a bit about my BTS adventure even though I'll probably say more tomorrow.

And so I've done.

And because my old enemy, "putting two videos in the same post" is still screwing my posts up, here's a link to the video of the same song as it was sung on Aug. 28 at Soldier Field, as I watched, listened, and almost wept. I urge you to watch and listen as well.

Current Mood: enthralled
Current Location: the home office
Current Music: BTS "Mikrocosmic"

ericareyes

sheliak

(If you're not familiar—yes, someone made an animated film out of that fairy tale; yes, that's animation! They started out with a more conventional style before losing the budget for it, and the change was definitely for the better; there are some surreally Disney-esque clips of the original version floating around.)

( 460 icons )

tinny

luminousdaze asked me how I go about color challenges. I love color challenges and participate in a lot of them, so here goes!

First off, I always try to fit every color into every icon. ...This does not make my icons the best-looking in the hall of fame posts, just sayin. :D People who go for exactly one color, at most two, are the highlights of those. Example: iconcolors hall of fame #85.

Looking through my icons for

iconcolors, I ended up with two main techniques I use that I am going to describe here:

1) Gradient Maps

I already wrote a tutorial on that here. But I think it's worth going into detail about how to decide whether a palette works for a gradient map or not. Because most of them don't really.

gradient map examples

Palettes that I have used Gradient Maps for recently:

All these have one characteristic in common: you can order the colors from dark to bright and the resulting gradient will look nice. Mostly what this boils down to is that the skin color (of all but the very darkest black blorbos) will be something like beige/orange. This way, you can simply color the whole icon with that gradient and be done.

This is of course not always the case, but it's enough if two or three colors form a nice gradient - especially one where the face color is going to come out a) nice and b) close to the palette colors. In those cases, I use only some of the colors for the gradient, and then cut out the background and fill it with the remaining color(s). Like here:

I guess whether yellow-green-turquoise is a nice face color is subjective ;), but all three are palette colors, so I ran with it. The pink here looks like it's part of the gradient, but it's not really. There were no white parts in the image, so the pink never turned up. (Same with the red.) I simply colored his hair pink and the background yellow afterwards. I don't know why I put dark blue there because it's not part of the palette, but I suspect it just looked nice? There are no dark colors in the palette at all, and you always need a bit of contrast.

Here, the green palette colors aren't part of the gradient. The gradient just covers three colors, where actually the grey is a natural mix of the ochre and blue, so the grey appeared on its own. I thought the combination also looked nice on faces, so I went with it. The remaining green colors I used to manually color the background and his shoulder instead. Note that here, too, I added a darker blue to the gradient, so the icon retains some contrast, even though there is no such dark color in the palette.

Conversely: palettes I would not use for gradient map coloring:

The reason is relatively simple: none of these colors make for good face coloring. They're either too close together, like orange/red or the purples in these examples, or too far apart, like yellow/purple or yellow/blue. (Or just a color I didn't feel I liked at the time.) I want the end result to have the palette colors in them, not some grey-brown mishmash which you get if you make a yellow-purple gradient, and I usually also don't want the faces to be green or blue (although there are exceptions, see above :)).

For palettes like these, I will use my other coloring technique(s):

2) Manual Coloring

The main difficulty here is to hit the exact color from the palette. I can't claim I always manage. :) The things I look out for are hue and luminosity. As long as those two match relatively well, I'm happy. Saturation is also a factor, but not the first one I look at. So usually my process is like this, for every single color separately:

- find a part of the base that has at least similar luminosity already to the palette color I want to use
- color it
- if it's too dark, try to lighten it up (overlay with a light color, color dodge, linear dodge)
- if it's too light, try to darken it (overlay with a dark color, multiply, darken, color burn, linear burn)
- if it's too pastel or too vibrant, try to adjust the saturation

A lot of palettes will have matching saturation throughout, that's just what makes a palette look good/coherent, so usually this is not a problem.

I definitely didn't manage to pick examples for every single technique I listed here, but there is a lot of linear dodge and overlay at least. I mostly experiment with that, anyway, until I hit on a blending mode that fits. It depends a lot on the original cap and on the colors of the palette, so I guess there's no way around doing that by trial and error again every time.

On to the examples!

example 1

I loved this palette a lot, and I ended up coloring all three icons the exact same way, with yellow faces and purple clothes and green background. (I usually try to use at least two different ways to distribute the colors for each three-icon set at iconcolors, but... sometimes the palette just wants what it wants. :D) I sadly only managed to put the light grey into one of the icons. Here's a step by step tutorial on the second icon, which hopefully shows how I get the colors to match the palette in hue and luminosity:

I cropped and sharpened the cap, this is the base:

I added a color layer with the dark purple from the palette and manually painted the mask so the purple will color his hat and robe, and set it to Lighten 50%:

You can tell that the purple on his hat is still too dark (I put the palette purple next to it for comparison).

To bring it closer to the right color, you need to use a blending mode that makes everything brighter without losing the hue. Depending on the color and brightness of the cap, my go-to blending mode is Color Dodge. But sometimes Overlay works too, Lighten is good for pastels, or sometimes even Linear Dodge (Add) on very low opacity.

So I duplicated that layer and set it to Color Dodge 50%:

Oops, now it's the brighter purple (added here for comparison). That was not on purpose :D, but I need that color, too, so I continued.
Next area: the background. I added a color layer with the green from the palette and set it to Normal 100%.

Of course that exactly matches the palette, since the blending mode is Normal 100%. Moving on.
Next area: his face. I first tried to make it grey, creating another color layer, masking it to his face, and setting it to Color 100%:

If I'd liked the face grey, I would then have proceeded like with the purple and added another copy with some blending mode that makes it lighter. But I didn't like it, so I tried the exact same thing with the palette yellow instead, setting that to Color Dodge 50%:

Funnily, this only works when both the grey and the yellow layers are active. The yellow layer on its own looks like this:

Much too orange for the palette color (added for comparison).
Alternative ideas: duplicating the yellow layer and setting it to Hue 100% or to Color 100%:

They all looked too vibrant or too green for the yellow palette color (added in the middle for comparison).

So the combination of first desaturating it and then making it yellow came the closest to the palette. In this case, it was purely accidental, because the palette contained a grey color. But this is a neat trick that you might want to keep in mind. In this case it worked better than any of the alternatives.

Last step: I colored his eyebrows and lips with the purple from the palette, i.e. I manually painted over them with a small brush and set the eyebrows to Lighten 30% and the lips to Multiply 30%. Done.

Now, as I mentioned, the light grey is still missing in the final icon. I would usually then have used it as a light flare (like in the first example for this palette above), but I really liked the flat look of the icon, so I left it out altogether (and made a second one exactly like it). Well, 4 out of 5, I'm calling it a win. :D

example 2

All three of these are completely manually colored. I'll show the first one because it was the easiest, and because she is a ghost, so the white worked best with her skin color.

As usual, I cropped and sharpened the cap to get this base:

Next, I painted over their faces with the white from the palette with a soft brush (the black here is just for visualization, it's really transparent). To match the luminosity, i.e. make it light enough, close enough to the white, I set it to Color Dodge 20% - too much would have erased their facial features. Then I copied the layer and set it to Color (I left it at 20%, I can't tell you why) to get closer to the saturation/hue.

It's really not all that close, but I considered it good enough. Next, I decided that the existing luminosity of his robe was closest to the blue in the palette, so I colored his robe blue, again simply painting into a new layer with a soft brush. I set this layer to Color 100%. The luminosity really was already perfect, so I made no adjustments there at all.

Good. Next, yellow. Her robe is very light, so I chose it for the yellow color. I painted some of the palette yellow into the layer and set it to Color 100%. Again, the luminosity was already very good, so nothing else to do here. Then I decided that his robe could use a few golden highlights and painted over the lightest parts of his robe as well.

That was again very easy, no need to change the luminosity at all. The next step is the purple for the background: I painted it with the palette color and a very small hard brush, to get their contours. I left that at Normal 100%.

Now the only color missing is the red, and it fits well with the purple, so I added a texture by azuremonkey to try and get some red in there. I rotated the texture and then recolored it to orange (because purple+orange->red). I clipped that to the purple background layer and set it to Linear Dodge (Add) 30%:

That didn't look quite red enough to me yet, so I added another layer with the red color, set it to Saturation 100%, and then toned down the texture to Linear Dodge (Add) 10%, which gave me this:

Almost the same, but I liked it better. (Now that I'm looking at them again, I feel like the darker purple suffered from this step, it looked closer to the palette color before. Oops.) Okay, last step: I thought it could need some lighting. I will usually choose the lightest color in the palette to add a light spot, but this time, I thought there was already enough white and not enough yellow, so I picked yellow. I painted one corner with a very soft brush and set it to Normal 100%:

Not bad, and it nicely balances the yellow in the other corner, but... I thought it drew the eye too much, and the red color was still underrepresented in the icon, so I ended up setting it to Overlay 100% instead:

This, kind of accidentally, turned the lighting red, and I thought it looked much better this way. That was it!

I'm not sure this tutorial really managed to show the parts where I fix luminosity after the fact (except maybe for the faces, but they're really not white at all in the end either). A lot can be accomplished by choosing the right cap - just note that it doesn't have to be the color as much as the luminosity that has to match!

Just to be able to show one more approach, I added another example where I didn't already choose a fitting cap below.

example 3

For the same palette as above.

All right, now this cap barely has anything in common with the palette. *cracks knuckles*

The first thing I did was increase the saturation (and try to match the background to a palette color). So I used a Hue/Saturation layer and moved the Hue slider to the left (-39) from orange to red and the Saturation slider to the right (+41) to match the palette's high saturation. As I mentioned before, most palettes are similar in saturation for all their colors, so this will probably help with the rest of the colors, too.

Now his face looks fugly, but the background is how I wanted it. So far so good. Next: add purple. There are black parts in the background, and if I want to make them another color, I can just use a Lighten blending mode. Which is exactly what I did: I painted to the left and right of him with the purple color and set it to Lighten 73%:

Two down, three to go. The next thing I did was lighten up his jacket so it has some texture and doesn't just turn uniformly blue when I color it. I used the same technique I use for hair that I explained in my last tutorial two weeks ago. So I duplicated the base and squished the levels until the jacket had the kind of definition I wanted. (There are sparkly diamond-things on his jacket. \o/)

Then I masked away everything but the jacket, and ended up with this:

Okay, luminosity (and saturation) seem to fit, now: blue. I filled a whole layer with the blue from the palette and set it to Color 100%. You can also use Color Fill layers for this, I just never got used to those. I clipped it to the jacket layer, and now it looks like this:

I thought it was still too black and not blue enough, so I added another blue layer. That layer is also clipped to the jacket, it has its own mask, and I set it to Hard Light 82%. I am pretty sure it started out the same blue, but the Hard Light blending mode turned it more reddish/purple, so I adjusted the color to something a little more turquoise (#1b9fa5). For the mask, I just painted with a small black brush all the lines of the jacket i wanted to still have some contrast, and then I blurred it a little with the Smudge brush. It just lightens up the jacket a little bit:

Together with the blue from the previous step, it looks like this:

It didn't end up all like the palette blue, some of it darker, some of it lighter, but the overall impression is that the palette blue is hidden in the average there somewhere. I thought this was good enough. Next up is yellow. I used this opportunity to fix his face color. I (very messily) painted over his face with the yellow from the palette and then set it to Soft Light 57%. Now it looks more like his normal face again, just more saturated than before, but that fits the rest of the icon, so that's fine. His shirt could have stayed white, I guess, but I found the yellow in the palette more important than the white, so I painted over his shirt, too, and set the layer to Darken 63%. That makes it a bit more greenish-grey than yellow, but I didn't want it to pop out too much, so I left it like that.

Now we're almost done. All I did from here is smooth the edges of his jacket a bit and remove the yellow color from his eyes, and it's done! I did not use the white from the palette in this icon at all! (I will spare you the vampiric-looking experiments). Again, 4 out of 5, I'll take it.

I hope you like this tutorial! If you have any questions, let me know!

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