DE: My eyes went up to Heaven

[bjornwilde]

Quoth thebattycakes :
Where do you guys get icons from? I don't know about everyone else, but since the move from LJ I have been seriously lacking in places to find them here on DW. Google search hasn't quite caught up with the DW thing, so efforts to search DW icons usually lead back to LJ. Or Tumblr.

So rather than meandering about the internets aimlessly, getting distracted by shiny, how about y'all share some links? Or better still, some of your own work! Icons for pups, PBs, personal journals, whatever! If it's 100x100 and snaggable by the general public let us have it or a link to get there.

And of course some of us still cross back over into LJ territory, so those links are absolutely fair game. My big problem with LJ has been finding sites that are still active over there, so if you know 'em, share 'em!

So what say you muns, you writers of fables? Share your hidden treasures.

I have no idea why I am writing like this. I could blame this campy fantasy book I am reading but I doubt that's it.

Comments

[a1enzo]

I mostly ask artists of my acquaintance to draw 'em. Enzo hasn't been of canon age for years now. (I've got a "will proofread for art" deal with an author/cartoonist friend of mine once her next novel is ready, so that should help. She drew the nieces.)

[camwyn]

By and large, I get icons by cropping fanart or pictures of whoever I've chosen as a PB, rather than getting particularly well-crafted or edited icons. If I've got a movie PB I'll sit with the DVD in my computer and screencap the hell out of it until I get a handful of genuinely viable images. So I don't really have sources, truth be told.

However, I do feel a bit compelled to note that http://thedailies.grimfandango.org/ is a good source for PBs of color, since you kind of need PBs before you can get icons and it's not always easy to find suitable PBs for characters who aren't white.

[sdelmonte]

The advantage of playing pups from films/TV is that the icons are out there. Not that I am all that motivated to do much with icons.

The one pup I have trouble with is Charlie, and that's because most of the really good art of him is with the mask, and he rarely wears that now. There just weren't that many great closeups on him in 52, and I can't really use art from his classic comic since he doesn't have 80s hair now. One of these days, I might pull the trigger and just use Damian Lewis as a PB. It's not like I couldn't find a few good shots of him. (Note the CW: The Question would make a really good guest character on Arrow.)

[leeshajoy]

I prefer to make my own icons 95% of the time.

[genarti]

If it's a popular audiovisual canon, I go looking for people who are into that canon, and see if they have icons from it. If they do, and if they've made those icons or credited the maker, I go to the maker's journal and poke around in the tags, and see if they have an icon post or three I can steal from. This is, obviously, much easier with major characters, and with canons that are either currently popular or beloved classics. Even with more obscure stuff you sometimes luck out, though.

In theory, I might also screenshot (or find a screenshots gallery) and make my own icons, and I sometimes do if there's one particular scene I want an icon from. But in practice I'm usually too lazy and distractable to do that on a large scale. For animated or book characters, fanart can also be useful, although I ask the artist first if I can find contact info to do so.

Depending on the character, I might also go looking for other pictures of the actor. That works best with characters from modern Western societies; I would not, say, use Chris Hemsworth in other roles for Thor icons, except for Halloween or something. Most actors have fan sites with a lot of pictures, but again that's more true if they're at least somewhat mainstream popular.

For book characters, step 1 is picking a PB. (Although I might supplement it with pictures from Getty of vaguely similar-looking people, or pictures where no one's facing the camera, or landscape/object shots, or landscape/object shots with canon quotes. Lan and Edmund both had a lot of these.) If I already know who you want the PB to be, cool; I go googling for the person, and look for fans of whatever show(s) or movie(s) they were in who might have made icons of it. If I don't... it's been a while since I had to do this, so all my resources for PB comms are back on LJ or even IJ or websites, and I think some of them are defunct. But some of them aren't, or are maintained as an archive even if they're not making new icons.

[bjornwilde]

So my own answers now...
I don't know of any icon communities on DW and haven't taken the time to look for them. I know my default resources tend to be hollowart.com, and the insane journal comm's pb_updates and embargo.

If I am looking for new icons, I have found Tumblr to be a rabbit hole for source images, assuming a known actor plays the roll or I have a PB in mind. If I don't have a PB yet, I do a google search to see if there is a fan casting and whether I agree with it.

[vivien]

I use Google images to search for Christian Coulson (Tom) and then save images and make my own. They aren't fancy, but it works for me. I use Hollow Art for bases, too.

[misslucyjane]

For active fandoms, I follow the biggest, central community on LJ I can find where they post all kinds of fanworks. There are bound to be some good icon makers posting there, and sometimes they post to both LJ and DW.

For the rest, Google Image Search and then I make the icons myself. Sometimes GIS leads me to a good icon maker, too.

Also, if you do an interests search on LJ or DW you can sometimes winnow out a good icon maker or community. It takes some patience, though, and hoping people keep their interests up to date.

[saphyria]

I most often make my own. Yrael's icons are made from images of cats or photoshoppable images of people. Zelgadiss' icons are screencap icons I've made.

Sunshine's, though, apart from a few I've made, are mostly from the Amy Adams tag on Hollow Art.

[death_gone_mad]

Add me to the 'makes own icons' group. This one is a just a recolored M'gann M'orzz. Sometimes you have to look way outside your canon for icons.

Still, I have collected a few bookmarks from previous iterations of this question.

seethesoldiers
find_a_pb
find_icons
wikicon
pb_updates
embargo
frakkingcylon
hollow-art.com
costume_trunk
thedailies.grimfandango.org

[dynastessa]

Yep. Pretty much all of these IJ journals are great sources for icons.

Otherwise, I'll just screencap my own and make 'em!

[thenewblack]

You have no idea how much Artemis-in-my-head is squinting at killer red Martian M'Gann.

So much squinting.

[ceitfianna]

I start with Hollow Art to find a PB and usually get a good crop of icons from there. Then ask people nicely to manip them for me if that's needed. After that I tend to look for images especially for random things like mechanical stuff or horses. Since I like having not just NPC icons but landscape and stuff icons and those usually require me to make them or ask my canonmates.

In terms of icons iconaddicts always has icons from the newest fandoms as well as older ones, I've found some good ones there.
basicbases is where I start when looking for something like horses or cats, though the quality of icons is rather large, but it gives me ideas.
sunlitdays is one of my favorite icon makers and most of my couple icons came from her. She doesn't do fandom that much but she has beautiful stock stuff. Wonderful for icons that capture an emotion or an idea, both of Charles' tea icons came from her.

Frakkingcylon that was mentioned above is great, a lot of Tiwa's icons came from there and a lot of Charles' as well.

As I don't tend to follow fandom comms as much, usually my canonmates will point me towards comms that way. Canonmates or people who know your PBs are a great asset. I'm always looking for icons of Milliways' characters and sending links people's way or images that seem very like a character as I know others do for me.

[cameoflage]

This isn't relevant to either one of my actual Milliways pups, because I play a character from a comic and a character who literally has my face. But I know a shit-ton of IJ communities that do PB icons. (I made a significant portion of my own Aradia icons because I don't know where to look for Homestuck icons, and I kind of had to make my own icons for Thurlow.)

My first ports of call are always wikicon and find_icons when I have at least one PB candidate in mind and need icons; if I have a set of general appearance parameters and need a PB I'll go to pb_updates, or Hollow Art. (I find Hollow Art's actual icons kind of low-quality -- lots of grainy jpegs and contrast turned up high -- but they have a lot of PBs and a comprehensive tagging system, so they're a good place to look for a PB.)

Of course, a number of the places on wikicon/find_icons are flocked (and I've friended/joined so many of them as a matter of course -- since I don't do anything else with my IJ -- that I don't readily remember which ones those are) and then there are the ones that got into those icon directories and then went out of business, leaving a broken link.

If I can't find (enough) icons of a subject but I know a good place to get pictures -- which is a lot easier now that I know the ins and outs of Tumblr -- I make my own icons. (Picking Neil Gaiman as a PB and initially struggling to find icons of him is why I have made like two hundred icons of that guy, in total. I made a big batch and then never really stopped.) If someone has about the right facial features but their hair is too light or their eyes are the wrong colour or they really need to be turned into a Homestuck troll, I photoshop the icons appropriately.

[afullmargin]

The vast majority of mine are either hollowart or made by friends or from fanpop.com - which reminds me I totally need icons for *this* account...