Thursday, January 20, 2011

Could I Be An Avatar

Today's Teacher Blog Challenge is all about me. Not what I typically write about, for sure. But I'm willing to go down this road on the idea that establishing my identity is sort of like branding. Yesterday we worked on the "about me" page...today we work on creating a visual cue to who we are.

The challenge was to try some of the online sites that allow folks to create avatars of themselves and see how that works. I gave one a try...the Picassoheads site. There you get the tools to create your own impressionist image of yourself. It was fun to play around with, but I generally don't feel that any type of art falls within my strengths. And that is especially true if I'm trying to create me! But as I browsed the galleries on the site, I realized it didn't even need to resemble me...it just needed to be a consistent image that would represent me. So with that knowledge in mind...I picassoed myself!

Not too impressive. And not exactly the avatar I would want representing me as a professional.

I would rather work from a photo of myself. I know, many folks are not comfortable posting their photos online. But I'm okay with it. So I grabbed a photo - an older head shot cause I shaved that mustache after 27 years...






And I took off to try some other options.

At BeFunky, I ended up with a watercolor of myself. Not too bad...


And then I headed over to PhotoFunia and created two more options. The second watercolor option - which I like better than the first...

And the pencil drawing...perhaps my favorite...

Not sure which one I'll stick with. For now I'm tossing the pencil drawing on my profile. But I'll have to give it some thought to see if I want to stick with that or just go with the basic photo.

5 comments:

  1. How interesting to see your experiments with your avatar and a commentary of your thought process. I quite like the BeFunky version - must give that a try myself.

    To see what I think of avatars, I invite you to see me via(or my post.)

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  2. I agree, I really like the pencil drawing. Thanks for sharing how you went about the creation process.

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  3. I felt the same way about Picassoheads. It was easy to use (which is more than I can say about some of the avatar-creating sites), but I didn't want that image to represent me.

    I created a lego avatar but didn't want to actually use it. I'm much more comfortable with a real picture of me.

    Really liked the visual progression of your process with the terse narrative.

    Also really like your abbreviated "about me" at the top of the sidebar.

    Adding a link to your post on my avatar post which I'm still composing.

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  4. I also like the pencil drawing best and I think I will try it out myself.

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  5. Wow Emil. Congratulations, you are doing a brilliant job on the Teacher Blogging challenge.Thank you for your kind comments on my Blog. They were greatly appreciated. I always feel like I should write more but a picture speaks in any language so I keep using mainly my original photos trying to keep the blog interesting to a range of readers/viewers. Keep up the fantastic work and don't worry about being behind or what's right or wrong. Art's about choice and so is blogging.
    Best Wishes for 2011, Yvonne.

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