Just one icon this time round. I was asked by Susan B. if I planned to do one for the Nick and NatPack (NNPack). They're an old enough affiliation to have had one of the original faction pin designs, though its superimposition of a heart monitor screen on a large heart is..."rather too busy" is polite, I hope!



Anyway, I wasn't at all surprised when she said the faction had later voted on a new symbol. She pointed me to the store on their website, Mortal Love, where a good image of it can be found on a tile coaster:



It was from some of the elements of this design that I came up with my icon.

Oh, I changed things! I decided that I wanted to use a more delicately tinted sunrise—given the faction's tendency to "mortalize" Nick, I was sure it had to be sunrise. That meant that I also wanted to alter the colour of the ribbons that replaced the snakes of Natalie's caduceus symbol. (Also, I must admit, fuchsia isn't my favourite colour. However, it really didn't look good against blue and gold.)

To top the symbol, I also decided to create an alternative design. For this I got a dear little fat putti-style cupid from http://www.free-clipart-graphics.net/, and trimmed away his wings. I darkened him a little so he'd show up well; and removed his bow and arrow and darkened them a bit more so they'd be clear against him (and put them back, of course); and then I superimposed him on a very different, more angelic-looking pair of wings that I got from http://www.paper-moons.com.

The result was shown to Susan, who approved it. Since, on the icon, the whole thing is reduced too small for you to see the top of the design properly, I'm going to put it here. I hope other NNPackers also like it:



For the background of the icon, I looked for sunset/sunrise photos in the colours I fancied. Several looked very attractive, but proved unsuitable because of the lovely clouds. On such a small canvas, one needs to avoid anything that interferes with the ability of the eye to distinguish the things one needs the viewer to focus on. The picture I used in the end came from Wikimedia Commons.

So here's the icon I came up with:



Poor Nick and Natalie! The screen capture I used comes from "Night in Question"; and they used to be a lot closer! I had to split them apart and send them to opposite sides of the icon so that there'd be enough room for you to see the beribboned not-quite-caduceus properly.


Edited to add the version saying "Nick and NatPackers", as requested.