Spooky Halloween Icons?

[peasina]

Hello 👋

Would anyone like to join me as a signup buddy for characters20in20? It's a challenge to make 20 icons in 20 days! Their October round is Fall/Halloween themed and you can choose two characters from any franchise to make icons about. I'm going for two of my favourite spooky Pokemon, Drifloon and Gourgeist! 

I've been following the community for a little while to see how it works. It's fun that there's voting, though personally I think I'll enjoy having the motivation to make icons as I've been meaning to get back into it for a while. 

Happy October everyone 👻🎃💀

Comments

[straightforwardly]

I don't make icons anymore, so I can't be your sign-up buddy, but I do want to say that just seeing that 20in20 icon challenge username gave me such a burst of nostaglia. I used to love those 20in20 challenges back when I was a teenager, in my LJ days <3

[peasina]

I don’t remember them at all from LJ days but I didn’t really make icons back then, so maybe that’s why. It’s such a fun idea!

[straightforwardly]

I remember them showing up around the tail end of my LJ days. So 2010-2012ish? I kept up with other forms of icontests previously, but the 20in20 format felt so fresh and exciting, and agreed, I still think it's a great concept!

[peasina]

Icontests! I’m learning so many new things haha ^^

[straightforwardly]

Yes, icontests! I'm really digging into the cobwebs of my memory now, so forgive any vagueness/inaccuracies, but I remember there being so many lj icontests communities, each of them devoted to a specific fandom (or, particularly in bigger fandoms, a particular character or ship). Each week or so a theme would be announced, and icon makers would make an icon (sometimes more, though iirc there was pretty much always a limit to how many you could submit? I want to say the usual limit was between 1-3 icons per theme.)

Then all the icons created for the theme would be shared in a post, and voting would take place. Often, there'd also be these really cute custom-made winner's banners (showcasing the winning icon in question!) provided for whoever's work won. I think the really active communities had first through third place, and even honorable mentions, though in the dying years of LJ or in smaller communities they might just have one winner, such as if there were only 2-3 icons submitted in the first place.

This is such tl;dr, haha, but they were really fun! I don't think I actually participated in all that many*, though I followed a lot of icontest communities to find new icons for my hoard. (I was... really obsessed with icons back in the LJ era, haha; I even got a paid account solely so I could have more icon slots to use—very different from my current state of only ever having one icon—though I did actually find this icon during my LJ days.) But they were always fun to watch and vote in and participate in!

* after typing this out, I looked up the banner page on my old personal lj community where I used to post my icons to, and there were a lot more of them on there than I expected! So apparently I did do these contests more regularly than I remembered!

There were other kinds of icon challenges as well, where a community would have a specific theme and a list of prompts, and you'd claim something related to that theme and make an icon for each of the prompts. I.e., if there was a community called 25pokémon, you might make a claim for a specific Pokémon, you could claim Magnemite and then make 25 icons for the prompts provided. Sometimes there were deadlines (particularly if the community had stricter limits on how many people could claim the same thing), but others allowed people indefinite time to complete the challenge. You can see how the 20in20 format drew inspiration from both the icontests and those prompt challenges!

And this is such a tl;dr comment, haha. I haven't thought about any of this in so long, but now I've fallen deep into the nostalgia well. LJ really did have a great icon-making culture!

[peasina]

Thank you for digging into the cobwebs for me XD

Wow, even ships had their own icontest comms? That's so cool. (Now you've got me thinking about trying to run a Pokemon themed one 👀) I've seen some cute icon winner banners recently actually - that's so lovely. I'm glad you could revisit your old winning ones! I also used to be obsessed with collecting icons back in LJ days. It wasn't until really recently that I got back into them again.

Oh my god *reads further down* There was a Pokemon one!! I'd love to see 25 icons of my faves. The challenge of one icon per gen one Pokemon could be so fun too. Big ask though XD

Thank you for sharing your memories with me <3 It wasn't tl;dr at all, more I'm Too Disorganised, kept saying I'd Read Later XD

[nonesensed]

Like the first person to comment here, I'm also not an icon maker, but I hope you have great fun with the challenge, if you did end up signing up (with or without a buddy)!

[peasina]

Aww, thank you!! I've already made a few (I also animated one, then accidentally saved it as a PNG lol, so need to make that one again!!) It's a fun challenge :D

[nonesensed]

Yay, I'm so glad you're having/had fun! 💖 I'm heading over to the icon post a-sap to admire your work 💗