Some avatars and other stuff

I recently picked up photoshop and have been playing around with it. I figure this is as good a place as any to post some of what I've made.

This is an avatar for another mod


These two are from pics of John Ostrom, I have a thread about him here.









[edit on 25-8-2005 by Nygdan]

Nice job bud. Keep up the good work

Love that Ugly Doggy !!!...

Here's some more I made for 'special project'. The idea is to have a theme where a certain set of posters of one portion of the political spectrum are Sith, and the other guys are Jedi.



Bikereddie was the first to respond so he got Darth Vader himself!

I kinda like this one, perhaps its a little busy tho. I like the slant of the words in the center, sort of looks like the way the text in the movies scrolls on screen.

The mace windu one, I kinda wanted to have ti say 'deny ignorance mother*#@!, but that'd be inapropriate and a little silly.

[edit on 29-8-2005 by Nygdan]

Made some avatars for it




The Caesar one I was a little disappointed with. I made a 'new image' that was bigger that the orignal photo of caesar, pasted the photo, then found a fasces, cut and pasted it, then resized it and put a 'diamond' layer over it, this makes it look white, instead of like a darwing. I had hoped that the blades of the fasces would've been comming off the image tho, because the background was transparent. That'd've been neat, but when I 'saved for web' Adobe made it into a white background. So I changed it into a black background, which is 'invisible' if my miniprofile is black anyway.

I like the brutus one. The quote is from a bio of brutus written by Plutarch. I was especially surprised to find a coin issued by brutus and the other tyrannicides/conspirators that commemorates their act. it reads something like 'the ides of march', which is when Caesar was killed, has two daggers, with which he was killed, and has a 'liberty cap', which figures in a lot of later anti-monarchy-imperial movements of the revolutionary era in europe. So that was jus too neat to not include. The coin for caesar show's a 'cross' of weapons and armor with two mourners at the bottom of the cross, which is a whacky image to have with caesar.
This guy infact thinks that the jesus story is a corruption of the caesar story. Don't know about that but its still some good imagery.

Here are some other member avatars, they're kind neat I think. The first three are scans and digital photos from ancient religious manuscripts that I tweaked around a bit. The illuminated page I like quite a bit, the design on it is crazily intricate, and I used the saturate and cloning features to get rid of some of the grime and buildup and really brighten the colours. I think that these colours are usually, in the actual manuscripts, sort of metallic looking, like coloured tinfoil, or somesuch. They were pretty dull before I went over them, and they're not as bright as I'd like now, but still quite an improvement.





here is a link to a detail of that bird and Illuminated Letter for anyone intersted, from the original, not the cleaned up and saturated one.
img363.imageshack.us...

I switched the gun in Eastwood's hands with a rosary, and I think that it looks sufficiently realistic. The other guy is a greek hoplite, a spartan in fact, most telling of this is the 'upside down V' on the sheild. The words are 'I got your back', transliterated with the greek alphabet (iow, not in greek, just the greek letter equivalents). I used the sponge tool to saturate most of the stuff on the hoplite, especially the reds on the uniform and shield.

The effect of the spartan's having that letter in their sheild is said to be that their lines would look sorta like this as they advanced ^^^^^^^^^^

[edit on 4-11-2005 by Nygdan]

With the inauguration of the new Skunk Works Forum, there was a general feeling amoung many of us that things could get back to the more fundamental aspects of conspiracy theory, the sort of stuff that some of us, who've been looking at this stuf for a while, thought about when we first got interested in it all, when we first made that move from beyond the pale of normal and into this current somewhat offcentered world. People were saying that we could get back to basics. Then, ZeddicusZulZorander had an avatar of a person sitting a what looked to me like a lunch table, daydreaming, looking skyward, with 'back to basics' emblazoned across it. It was done in a cartoonish sense too, which complemented the atmosphere nicely.

So I figured, why not make some of my own 'back to basics' avatar.

There is no 'back to basics' campaign or 'lock down' or nuthin' like that, just some fun lil avatars. I made some with some people in mind too, as I usually do, might be obvious which are which. Anyone wants to use any of these, heck, that'd be awesome.

this one above I want to make sure that the copyright is clear, the original pic was created by a man named Justin Ouellette, and I thought it was fantastic and marked it up in photoshop.

One of the mods has been a real detective of late.

That's some pretty nice work there, Nygdan. I mean, really, some high quality stuff.

They're illustrations from some old books that I came across online. They were pretty messed up. I think I did a decent job of cleaning them up a little. I think I was googling Liberty Caps, the symbol, not the mushroom. Apparently there is some pyschedelic mushroom with the same name.

external image


(original source)
That last one is a political cartoon.

Pope Pius IX and Charles Albert of Savoy [...] are among those discomfited by the bell's sound

Are are two other interesting things:
The list of the passengers on the mayflower on the left and an avatar on the right. The document in that background is the mayflower compact.

Very cool stuff .

I remember for the longest time you never used an avatar or even colored your mini profile.
I'm glad you made the change .

Yeah, that lasted a long time. After a while, it got to be that I'd think, 'well I can't start using one now, just for tradition's sake'

NOW I CAN'T STOP MAKING THEM!!!!

ATS Style!

The name 'easter' for a holiday is supposedly derived from Eostre, a celtic-english pagan goddess. The bunny and eggs are associated with it because at the time of the holiday ground birds were nesting their eggs, and people would see rabbits in fields running around, with little nests with eggs in them all over the place. So for whatever the reason the bunny and eggs got associated with Eostre, the goddess. Eostre is sometimes said to be a western form of the eastern goddess Ishtar. Ishtar also is said to be called the "Queen Of Heaven" (or at least Inanna, another incarnation, is) sort of like how Mary is in christianity. And, supposedly, like mary, she is shown drapped in blue and white cloth.
You can see that Eostre and Ishtar sound like Easter.

So Happy Ishtar!





Some of these are avatar size, others are bigger and just for fun.

I guess I should include a bunch of older avatars that I've thrown together now too:


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[edit on 10-4-2006 by Nygdan]

Do you mind if I use the Brutus one?

Heck no, go right ahead! Use anything ya want, that goes for everyone!

I edited this image to make it a little more red, burnt in some more shadows, saturated the hell out of it.

Here are some new avatars that a particularly fiesty Poster requested:

Nygdan, you did a great job on these! Wonderwoman is my fav, I think! I'm going to save all of these and switch 'em around from time to time. I hope that's ok!!! THANKS for doing such a terrrrrrrrrrrific job!

Edited to add: That looks awesome!

[edit on 20-4-2006 by zenlover28]

zen: Remember that you don't need to save them anywhere, or even upload them to your ats account, the imageshack url will be just about as stable as the ATS uploads url. When you decide to switch to a different one, you can just refer to this thread to recall the url.

Just to be clear, If anyone else is interested in these avatars, feel free to use them also. You'll prolly not want to use the one with 'zenlover28' written on it, unless you're her cheerleader!