Some really nice choices of colours there!

Thank you very much.

Here via Petzi.

These are really lovely icons.

Thank you.

Doesn't Petzi do great work.

She really does, yes.

Love the dark Willow ones. And the shirtless Spike is so yummy.

Thank you ... shirtless Spike is truly yummy!

Nice trip down memory lane with these icons! I think some of your best work is here, including 11 and 14. They are so very very different too one another, and both marvelous portraits of Wlllow. 11 is so meltingly soft and naturalistic; 14 is more dramatic and stylized but very elegant and autumnal at the same time. I always think of that one depicting Willow as tentatively emerging from the stasis she's been in

#3 always amazes me how well you use that shine filter (I am always trying to imitate what you do with it and rarely succeed.) So clever.

#10 is probably my favorite example of your use of that particular effect; it looks exactly like vintage adverts (coffee advert perhaps?) I remember seeing in old magazines from the 1950's.

GREAT crop on #5 (you mentioned male shoulders on my 20in20post and I see what you mean with that. Powerful image, no FX necessary. I love how you've cropped 16 and the way you've balanced light and shadow on her arms so it looks as if I could touch her skin (I can even see the hair on her arms, but it isn't over-sharpened or over-detailed), is marvelous and very very difficult to achieve

I do like that shine filter ... but it's true that I often give it a go, and end up not using the result as it didn't work. However sometimes it is really brilliant.

I enjoy getting a good crop first ... that was what I started with when I first tried making basic icons ... and is something I still start with. However it's great seeing those comments and knowing that my "eye" is working OK.

but it's true that I often give it a go, and end up not using the result as it didn't work. However sometimes it is really brilliant.

*nods* I think that's true of any effect but more so for certain ones - the less subtle, more dramatic, the more care required, like "my" beloved photo collage effect *POINTS TO ICON* When it works oh me oh my is it wonderful but so often it simply doesn't.

Do you find it frustrating too when you know how you want somthing to look and can't make it happen?

that was what I started with when I first tried making basic icons

The basics are always important.

OT, one of my biggest issues with the perception of "modern art" is that it's only about emotion and feeling ("Paint what you feel!") and requires no skill whatsoever. Nonsense. you have to know the rules in order to be able to break them and do so with a purpose. And that is the end of my little rant-y.

Oh and I just saw that the voting is up for Round 5 of btvsats20in20! Good luck sweetheart! (And we can vote for ourselves this time around too.) Have you voted? I haven't voted because I looked and I'm going to need a lot of time to figure out my voting, and the way we vote is totally different to past rounds. I think there's like four different voting posts so it's like a mid-term examination

What's striking to me this round more than ever is how much of a piece so many sets are to one another in terms of quality - in fact I'd say pretty much true of almost all of them.

The collage effect is one I have yet to find working ... yet I love this one of yours.

It seemed weird to vote for my own! I think overall I tend to look and chose the first ones that jump out at me, then I look back and study them and see what really works for me.