I'd had a couple of "ideas" for new user pics that I'd been dumping images into a file for over the past couple of months, however, the pic of me from Circus World (that I opined would make a good one a post or two back) was the spark that got me messing with the graphics programs today.
I, obviously, cleaned up the background, while keeping the general color, cropped, re-sized, grabbed a color area from my coat for the text, and sized it to the 100x100 pixels. It's not the best pic of me, but it's a typical shot of me behind the camera. Almost all the existing pics of me are shot in some mirror like this!
Anyway, what do you notice about the colors here? Orange and blue? Yes, some would say that those were "Illinois" colors, but I really have never been one to follow college sports. However, it did remind me that I had been planning on doing a BEARS pic for a while (of course, the similarity had intentional roots, as George Halas wanted "Illinois-like" colors for his Bears, so went with the general color scheme, if with different specific hues of orange and blue), and had downloaded a graphic for that purpose a while back. Since I was into the process, I pulled that up, shifted things around a bit, dropped in "BTRIPP", and ended up with this:
However, I was saddened to think how far away football season is, and was feeling like I was somehow slighting my Cubbies. To avoid this, I ran off to the web to grab a Cubs graphic, and did pretty much the same as on the Bears pic, but adding the plaintive vow of the die-hard Cubs fan: "If it takes forever!":
Now, at this point I'd pretty much cleaned out my "downloaded user pic ideas" files, but I still had a nice graphic of the Libertarian Party's "Liberty" logo in there. I figured that since I was on a roll, I'd go ahead and work something up with this. I at first did all the dark blue parts, but it "needed something", so I went out on the web to find a nice wavy flag, and filled the space with that (being one of those "neocon" Libertarians, as opposed to "anarchist" Libertarians, I'm more prone to jingoistic displays!), resulting in a pretty sweet looking bit of political propoganda:
So, there you have it ... more stuff that I'm sure nobody fucking cares about but me!