A mixed group of smaller factions....

The first icon is one of three that I made in quick succession back in April, all of which turned out, for some reason, to have somewhat rosy tones. Now that would make perfect sense if pink were my favourite colour; but, though I esteem Tracy as a partner for Nick, I've never been a Perkulator. The Pit of Condemned Bimbos Survivalists' icon was in the last lot; this time you have the icon for the Knights of the Cross: the one for the Knights in Darkness is yet to come.

The second icon here gave me much more trouble; and I returned to it several times before I finally came up with something satisfactory. I knew immediately, though, that for the T & V Pack—short, apparently, for Tracy and Vachon Pack (and what it is with these "Pack" names, I don't know!)—I wanted to play with the idea of initials by using wooden blocks. You know: a common children's toy, with letters, numbers, or pictures on each face. For this younger couple, I fancied a return to the nursery, and intended to surround screencaps of the two of them with piles of wooden blocks. However, I just couldn't get the layout to work; and, in the end, I took a slightly different tack.

The last icon is the most recent, completed only a few days ago—and very nice it was, after all that FortuneCity business, to get back to playing with graphics.




Knights of the Cross:

The Knights of the Cross are essentially a group for Christian Forever Knight fans who want to be able to discuss the show's characters, events, and themes with those of a sympathetic bent. Many episodes are appropriate to such discussion, for Nicolas de Brabant is a man of the Middle Ages with a Christian background that still informs his response to the requirements of a vampire existence.

I decided to go back to Nick's mortal life for the motifs in the icon. He was a Crusader, so I looked for medieval images. The cross comes from Wikimedia Commons: it's actually a twelfth-century reliquary cross. As you can see from the original, I altered the dimensions a little: for the icon, I needed something a little slimmer and taller. The knight is actually Godfrey of Bouillon, one of the leaders of the First Crusade. In the illumination from which I clipped the image, he is shown leading his troops into battle. It's a little anachronistic using this picture, since Nick actually lived over a century later; but I thought it a most appropriate image in terms of subject.




T & V Pack:

Although I had tried in vain to come up with an acceptable layout involving piles of alphabet blocks, I did like the idea of associating toys with Vachon and Tracy. Somehow, compared with Nick and Natalie, the couple seems so young and...innocent. Angst-free, anyway.

I decided, therefore, to use a toyshop as the background for the icon. The frame is wood; and a similar frame surrounds the logo, which I kept from my original design. And, although I used letters cropped from real blocks, I laid them on the same wood graphic for consistency in the design.

I had been trying to use a screen capture of Vachon and Tracy together in a quiet moment in the abandoned church. However, in the end, I swapped this out for separate figures of the two of them. Yes, though they fit together so well, the screencaps do, in fact, come from different episodes.

In the end, I did toss a few alphabet blocks into the icon: you can find them tumbling out of the frame down at the bottom.




R.U.G.s:

Ribena™ is a popular blackcurrant drink in England, originally in the form of a concentrated sweetened juice intended to be mixed with water. (The Latin word for currant is ribes; hence the brand name.) Nowadays, you can also get it in ready-to-use in drink boxes or in carbonated form. However, it was the undiluted concentrate that was used on Forever Knight to provide "blood" for the actors to drink. In small doses this is deliciously intense; but the actors had to quaff it down, and—what with retakes—they rapidly found it to be sickly sweet.

As the number of factions increased, someone created the Ribena Users Group. Its members are R.U.G.s; though I'm sure they don't intend to let anyone wipe their feet on them! Yes, it sounds like a joke—and, in a way, I suppose it was, but the faction was real enough to spawn at least one website, though it has long since disappeared.

For the icon, of course, blackcurrants had to dominate. I googled up a selection of images, cropped round several, and assembled them around the ubiquitous glass-of-blood that has appeared on so many other icons. A bottle of Ribena was then superimposed. For the logo, I selected a font with twiny bits, did the whole thing in blackcurrant purple and leaf green, and added a few judiciously placed currants.


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I think I'll have to include all three of these icons in my next collection of enlargements: it's impossible at this size to see the delicate detail of the KotC logo, the toys in the storefront, or the fact that the period after each letter of "R.U.G.s" is actually a tiny fruit.