Meme omake

This icon was not memed but I'm so darn proud of it I'm going to talk about it anyway.

This one is my own work, from shutter click to icon load. It started life as an oak tree beside the highway, next to a bunch of tractors and a Citgo sign. If you've thought that I have a Thing for trees, you're right, and this one was so perfect I just had to stop and take a few shots of it. Five or six of my icons are based on shots of this tree.

This one is actually two versions. There's the leafy version, and the winter version superimposed on it to bring out the branch structure. And the 'clouds' at the bottom? Are the sign and tractors worked over with the smudge tool. Total serendipity.

When I went to make this an icon, it really wanted something on the right, so I took a strip and color-inverted it to make the background for the text, and that worked really nicely too.

All together, this is probably the best image I have ever created from scratch. I'm not really a graphic designer, so when something goes this right? I glee over it a lot. ^_^