How to Easily Create Your Own
Avatars
So you want to spice up your profile picture. You
are sick to death of looking at your photo on every page you click. You want to
add a little bit of your personality, some pizazz, to your Twitter and Facebook
page. But you can’t find anything that
fits. Why not make your own avatar? It’s easier than you think.
First off, I suggest using a simple website called Picnik. This site allows you to load photos
and change them up easily and quickly. They have lots of great fonts to choose
from if you want to caption your pics, and effects are a lot of fun to play
around with too.
Okay, so now that you have the site up, find a
background. It could be your favorite color, it could be a headshot of your
favorite actor, it could be a photo of your cat. Whatever you choose, make sure
it will be easy to recognize when it is shrunk down to avatar size.
Loading the photo to Picnik is the easy part. Then
you have to crop it. Cropping a picture is just removing the excess. Most
photos are wider than they are tall, but most avatars are square, so you’ll
have to crop your background to an approximate square shape. Do not resize your
photo yet. It gives you a better quality end product if you edit your photo
large before shrinking it.
Once your picture is the right shape, frame it.
There are many types of frames available, but a plain black frame works best
for avatars. It will look a little thick, but it will turn out fine. Once the
frame is in place, you can work on the effects. You might want to turn a
monochromatic picture into sepia or black and white. You can even pick and
choose which spots to turn or leave colored. You can highlight areas in your
photo or outline them. Play around and see what looks best.
When you are satisfied with the background, you can
work on captioning. Half the fun of creating your own avatar is putting your
own words on it. Short and sweet is best. You want to still be able to see the
background. Play around with the spacing of the words and make sure they are in
a clear, bold font. Impact works best in either black or white. It has the most
impact and takes up the least amount of space.
When you like the final setup, it is time to save.
Save a copy at full size first, so you can edit it later if you need to. Then
save an avatar sized copy. There is an option for pixel size on Picnik, so
anywhere from 100x100 to 200x200 is good for avatars, depending on the site.
That’s all there is to it. Have fun, play around,
and post your own creations. You might even end up making personalized avatars
for your friends!
Author
Bio
This Guest post is by Christine Kane, a graduate of
Communication and Journalism. She enjoys writing about a wide-variety of
subjects including internet
providers in my area for different blogs. She can be reached via email at:
Christi.Kane00 @ gmail.com
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