(no subject)

[catslash]

So I'm trying to do a bit of an overhaul on my current icon collection; I'd like to just do it over with a baseball theme and have specific icons for Angry and Yay! and WTF? and things like that.

I managed to come up with a baseball gay icon *points up* but for the rest I'm kind of at a loss. I've never attempted to actively find pictures to portray moods before. Does anyone have any tips on how I go about this?

Comments

[ayrdaomei.livejournal.com]

I've made two mood themes now (a random fandom, and a firefly theme), one was easy because it gave me tons of different images to work with and the other a bit harder because it was character specific for a show that only lasted 14 eps....but I imagine if I wanted to do a baseball mood theme, I'd go through the same process. The matching pics to moods thing isn't all that hard, really. At first. I'd gather up all my baseball images in one folder and knock out all the easy/obvious moods right away (guys high-fiving = 'excited' or 'happy', and I'd move on :-P). And then I'd suffer over the last 10 or so moods, which are all way too similar to other moods (do we really need 'geeky' and 'nerdy'? 'irate' and 'annoyed'?), and such a pain in the ass to find different pictures for. I can't help you with the Tigers or Astros, but I have a decent amount of 2004 postseason images saved on my comp, lemme know if you'd like me to send that to you.

[catslash.livejournal.com]

Whoops, I didn't mean to confuse, I wasn't looking for a mood theme, just different icons. My collection is kind of random and I need better ones to express certain concepts.

I might make a mood theme some day, if I go completely insane, but then I might not. Uploading the one I've got drove me up the wall with the tedium and I have no intention of going through that again any time soon.

[ayrdaomei.livejournal.com]

Ooooooh. I think I see what you mean. Though I can't imagine the process would work all that much differently, since the only difference between mood themes and icons depicting moods would really be in the size of the image. Yahoo's got a few pics of Boomer in that umpire's face - a 100 x 100 crop of that knocks 'angry' off your list :-P 'WTF' is a bit more trouble, but there's always that image of Nixon watching BP in Millar's shirt...or any image you can dig up of Pedro being Pedro.

Is the issue that you don't have enough images to choose from? Or that you just can't translate image to emotion easily? I mean, your choice for gay totally amuses me, so I think you know what you're doing :-P

[catslash.livejournal.com]

Ooh, good idea, I'll see if I can track some of those down.

The trouble is that I don't really know how to start looking. I'm not a terribly visual person so the only pictures I look at are the ones that show up on my friends list. Generally I just make icons as the mood strikes me - when I decide I need something specific, or I see a picture that demands to be iconed. Seeking out pictures that embody a general concept is a different thing entirely. I'm adequate at iconing itself; I don't know how or care to learn about fancy techniques, but I can crop an image into what I want and slap on some text if it needs it.

Glad you like the gay icon. =D I knew as soon as I decided I needed one which picture to use and how I was going to crop it.

[ayrdaomei.livejournal.com]

The trouble is that I don't really know how to start looking. ... Seeking out pictures that embody a general concept is a different thing entirely.

Directly seeking out only pictures that embody a concept is gonna be uber-difficult. I would say just head over to the Sox gallery at Boston.com and just start gathering up pictures that appeal to you. Once you have a sizable bunch to go through, I'm sure you'll start to see pics that will work for icons you want. If that seems a little daunting given the volume of images on that site, let me know if you want my '04 postseason folder of pics. I didn't save everything I can across, just the images I found visually interesting.

And I'm sure you probably know this, but if not, yahoo sports has a team-specific gallery that you can check out for recent images of your teams. It's not like you can just google a player's name and moods, so it's just a matter of gathering up just about anything you can find and sorting through it. That's how I would do it anyway, but perhaps your flist peeps can better help you out.

[catslash.livejournal.com]

Images from Yahoo are all fucked up, I can't add text because the fonts come out too small. *cries* I found such a perfect picture too.

[catslash.livejournal.com]

Except, holy shit, I found a way to do it. It was the simplest thing ever, too, but I never thought it would work. Ha, PhotoShop, I will conquer you yet.