The vote is in! Bourbon now has his own faction, demi-official in as much as the name got picked by consensus. Okay, not a lot of people bothered to mention a preference. However, the tally stands at three for the Musketeers versus two for the Bourbons.

We also have the Denied, for that name was unanimously chosen (albeit by only three people) for a faction for Emily Weiss.

With these, I toss in a couple of others that I've mentioned before in passing. Jenny Schanke has never officially had a faction, though she appears in a fair amount of fan fiction. So here's the icon for the Jenny-Poos. And, though an old and significant faction like the NatPack must cover a lot of ground, there should be room for a smallish subfaction of LabNatties.




Musketeers:

According to the Season Three "bible", Bourbon was supposedly a Musketeer in sixteenth-century France before being brought across. Of course, none of this made it into any of the episodes, for he was the least seen of Vachon's crew. Nevertheless, it is backstory that has flavoured some fan fiction.

As the word suggests, a musketeer is a soldier armed with a musket. However, in France the Musketeers of the Guard were dragoons (i.e. mounted infantry) in the Royal Household, and largely comprised of minor nobility. As Wikipedia puts it, "The Musketeers soon gained a reputation for boisterousness and fighting spirit because the only way for social and career advancement was excelling at their task as mounted light dragoons." Whence, of course, the characters in Dumas's novel.

I've based the icon design on their flag (which you can see here). The central design has been lightened a bit so that it won't overwhelm the figures; but the colour of the crowns in the corners is more heavily saturated, and I picked shades from it for the logo.

Besides the usual screen capture of the character, I also included the figure of a Musketeer in uniform, cropped from an old picture that I found here.




LabNatties:

Naturally, I used the turquoise tiled wall of Natalie's office as the background for the LabNatties' icon, and picked a screen capture of her at work. I would actually have preferred her at the autopsy table; but the best pictures all ran full screen height, down to her waist and up to either the scale or the hanging light, and as such took up too much of the space. So, in the end, I picked a picture of her at the microscope.

The anatomical diagram, X-ray, and hazardous waste bin were all found on the 'Net. However, similar things were familiar sights. They just got shown partially, or in the distance, or skewed at an angle that made it hard to fit them nicely into an icon.

The symbol of the NatPack is a caduceus; and, at first, I thought I'd (naturally!) use the same one that I've employed in other icons. However, it did not fit texturally with the other things in the design. I decided, therefore, to pick a simpler drawn caduceus. This I then fitted into the logo, substituting it for the Ts in "LabNatties". I tried using one caduceus, and then superimposing a pair in the same space (one for each T, you see). In the end, though, it worked better if I used one top with two tails.




Jenny-Poos:

We never really met Jenny, for all that Schanke often talked about her. Like her mother (and, in Season Three, Tracy's father), Jenny was an off-screen character. Nevertheless, in one episode, we saw the annual police picnic, where Schanke knelt down to speak to a young child. Even the sex was indeterminate, since the view was from behind. Nevertheless, some fans assume that this was Jenny. So that had to be the picture I used, being the only one.

Also associated with the character is a school assignment she was given in which she was supposed to describe what a father is. Schanke promptly took it upon himself to help her; and, at one point, hauled out the crumpled assignment sheet to look at. This, then, is the other main feature of the icon.

Since Jenny is clearly quite young, I used a script font in the sort of style used by an elementary school teacher when the class is just learning cursive. To accentuate the effect, I added a set of fine guide lines marking the loops of the letters.




The Denied:

We know little about Emily Weiss that can be used to elaborate the icon for her affiliation. I therefore focused on her latest novel, the title of which provides the name of the faction. There is no perfect image of it in any of the screen captures; but the best of them can be edited to remove the fingers holding the book and fill out the edges of the book jacket. This and the screen capture dominate the design. Indeed, given the prominent title on the book, I did not bother to complicate the layout by duplicating the name in a logo.

The background has simply been trimmed from a shot of the bookstore in which she did a signing. Since most of it is covered by the main design, I copied the actual bit showing the table where Emily is sitting, and fitted it into the one empty spot, down in the lower right corner. It's not exactly clear; but it adds some interest to the space.