Thursday DE: Face it, Tiger

[bjornwilde]

This came up in chat earlier this week so I am stealing it for a topic, PBs and the faces we chose for our pups.

Some of PB greatest hits include:
What are your current sources for icons?
Do you ever fancy the face you've chosen for your pup?
Are there faces you haven't found the right pup for yet?
Do you prefer photos vs art? Faces vs props?
What is your secret formula for finding that perfect face for the pup? Or does the face matter than much to you?

ETA: Please don't feel like you have to answer all of these questions. There are more to lead to ideas rather than specific inquires. :)

Comments

[from_the_outside]

I feel like there is never a time when I don't struggle with either:

A. Finding the right PB or
B. Getting icons of the right PB (so I've always made many of my own)

I always choose a PB who has no icons available/isn't in many projects/has no screencaps of the right projects. Consider Jeremy Sumpter:



He's been my Caspian for so long that in my head, he IS Caspian. But Jeremy's career never really took off and it's difficult to find projects I can cap for icons. Enter Toby Regbo as Francis in Reign:



This guy's got it all: the blue-gray eyes, the awkward page-boy haircut, the period clothing, the dark-haired paramour, even a sailing sequence! If Reign had been out when I first apped Caspian, it would have been all over. As it is, I use a combination of icons now, Jeremy and Toby, along with stock photo icons, which used to be pretty common but now seems to have fallen out of fashion.

When I first started playing Sharon Carter, I used Yvonne Strahovski (as Sarah Walker in Chuck) as my PB:



That was before EVC was cast as Sharon. But then when she was cast, there were (and still are) hardly any icons of her; most of my Sharon icons are from EVC's turn as Emily Thorne in Revenge. Yvonne is making a comeback in my 616!Sharon journal, though.

Zinda Blake has been a headache to PB ever since I started with her. I've used Naomi Watts, Mircea Monroe, and a combination of blonde bombshells like Veronica Lake, Jayne Mansfield, and Lana Turner before finally settling on (mostly) Melissa George, who has that mega-watt smile and 'your best galpal' vibe I associate with Zinda:



But only with particular hair/attitude. I can't find any screencaps of the seasons I need from her turn in Alias so I'm a little limited with her icons.

There are just no really good dragon PBs for Temeraire, who has a very specific look I haven't seen duplicated in dragons I've seen in other media. I chose James Norton as Prince Andrei in War & Peace for Laurence despite his having darker hair (Laurence is blond) because A. he wears a bottle-green military jacket with gold accents and B. he's got that upright but slightly hangdog 'I am sad about a non-specific thing and will go gaze morosely out a window' look that I always picture Laurence as having.

[bjornwilde]

Icons are loads of fun and having a great one for that certain expression is priceless. It's also great when you can find one the just catches the epitome of the character.

I know finding the perfect face is important with pups that don't come from visual media. I recall Thalia being a particular thorn in my side as I could never quite find a face that worked for her.

I have wished to use Antonia Banderas for a pup for a while now but never have found the right pup. I'd also love to use Cate Blanchett someday.

[configuration_birdwatcher]

My first stop is Hollow Art, because it's one of the icon places I remember from the late 2000s and early 2010s that's still running whereas most of the InsaneJournal iconmakers have collapsed. I'm told pb_updates is still good though. I'm willing to make my own icons if I can find pictures to work from, but I rarely do this with actual live-action PBs because it's difficult to find screencaps (or downloads) of some obscure movie where the actor I'm looking for has just the right haircut.

How important it is to me that I have a PB for a human-shaped, non-live-action character depends on three main things: what canon art exists of them and how it looks (variety of angles and expressions, stylised vs realistic art), how much work it would be to make the icons look right if they have unnatural/nonhuman features I'd need to add, and how much I want them to read as a person versus a cartoon. I split Wilson's icons between canon art and a PB despite having enough canon art to fill his icon slots, partly because the art of Don't Starve is so stylised that people have interpreted his appearance many different ways that only vaguely resemble one another and I wanted to be more specific about what my version of him actually looked like, and partly because having a real human face helps anchor his portrayal in reality in a way that might be harder to sell if he exclusively looked like a little cartoon man with funny hair in his icons.

By contrast, the Homestuck teens are harder to pick out PBs for in the first place, their canon art is a bit closer to human proportions, and once I found icons for them I'd have to do a lot of photoshopping to get the grey skin and horns and stuff on there. I've taken cursory looks but haven't found any public figures I like and asking cosplayers if I can use their pics for RP icons would be weird, which is why the only time I use cosplay pics for icons is if they're my own. (Which I actually did do with Thurlow and am considering doing for the Impostor once I finish that cosplay, in both cases because I have a pretty specific look in mind that's difficult or impossible to find on icon sites.)

Bastion and Wormwood don't have human faces so they don't need PBs unless that were to change. I've considered adding fanart icons (either drawn by me, or after getting permission from the artist) to Wormwood if I made some space in his icon slots though, in order to clarify that he's actually adult-sized and kind of gangly and only looks teeny-tiny because the art style of Don't Starve makes everyone look teeny-tiny.

[thekidfrombrooklyn]

Most of my characters have been from prolific visual media so pictures and icons haven't been hard to find. I collected a bunch from Livejournal back in the day, but lately if I've needed a new one for whatever reason I've made them myself. The hardest ones to find, oddly, has been Mabel and Dipper from Gravity Falls. There aren't many screencaps out there, and I've got the show in digital format so I suspect there's some DRM that would prevent me from making screencaps on my own.

When I played Cecil from WTNV for a minute several years ago, I used objects or landscapes, since we had no idea what Cecil looked like and there wasn't much fan art. I used broadcasting microphones, deserts at sunset, the eye logo... probably more that I've forgotten about.

I think the hardest one to find was jack_inthegreen. My first thought was Donal Logue, but he seemed too ... soft? for what I wanted to do with Jack. I landed on David Wenham as a face cast, because he had a little edge along with the kindly paternal feeling I wanted. I used Billy Boyd for a while, too, but went back to David. I also used sculptures of the Green Man and other foresty-protective type things, because my Jack was always mostly tree :). (Which is why the notion of Slenderman as a pagan tree god gone mad hit me so hard, I think -- he's like the shadow version of Jack.)

[alongfallfromgrace]

For Wei Wuxian, I mostly steal good screencaps from the live-action version I find on blogs, though I do have a link to All The Screencaps, so if I ever have the time and brainspace I can hunt for my own. I kind of wish the show had found an alternate WWX for one of his lives (though also not, I love his actor), because having an alternate face at this point where he is in Mo Xuanyu's body would be great.

[sticktothemission]

Both of mine are video game toons. I've made most of my own icons, but I do use some fanart out there with credit, especially for things like beardless Gabe. It's nice that there's out of game art as well, like comic books, to draw from, too, though Khadgar certainly has less (many more in game cinematics than Gabe).
Reaper's kind of easy, it's just different angles/lighting of the mask, though I do have at least one that I took using his statue.

I've dabbled with finding a live actor version with both, but haven't found the right face for either yet.

[canttrickmeanymore]

What are your current sources for icons?
-- assuming i don't make them myself, i usually find 'em around DW

What is your secret formula for finding that perfect face for the pup? Or does the face matter than much to you?
-- i play mostly pups out of visual media, so they come pre-faced. XD