Feb 10 2007
My Cheap Custom Avatar
Chris from The BizTechie Chronicles left this comment:
“That is a cool avatar. Not sure I’d pay money for it each month.”
Well Chris, thanks for the compliment! But I didn’t pay anything for my avatar. I am not even sure how to go about buying or even renting one.
My custom avatar is cheap. Real cheap.
When I signed up for MyBlogLog I needed an avatar. If I didn’t upload one, I’d end up with the default Shadow Guy.
I didn’t have an avatar. I’d avoided the whole avatar thing so I wouldn’t have to think about how to represent myself to others.
Was I a cartoon character? At four-foot-ten-and-three-quarters I’ve been mistaken for one.
How about something dark, sexy and cool? Hmmm. Not sure if I wanted to send that particular message.
Inanimate object? Maybe a stone or a harmonica.
Aargh. This was taking up too much processing time.
After I figured out what I wanted, how would I make it into an avatar?
I hunted around and saw that I could create an avatar via Yahoo. I came up with this:
Then I came across eLouai, a doll maker site which offered free avatar creation. I came up with this:
Huh.
While all this provided hours of nail-in-the-eye fun, it wasn’t helping me decide on an avatar.
OK. Time to get creative.
Time to get out ….the crayons.
Well, what I consider the software equivalent of crayons – Microsoft Paint.
Yes, Grasshoppah, ancient drawing technology. It’s so ancient that I had to dig it up under C:\i386\mspaint.exe. It wasn’t available via Start->All Programs-> [ ...]
I can doodle at meetings with the best of ‘em. I poured myself a glass of red wine to in order to access the more creative areas of my brain.
I pondered.
I drew a lot of cartoon cat heads.
I somehow ended up with something close to the avatar I currently have. I think I came up with it around the 3rd glass.
I don’t have any pricey image editing software. I’ve managed to get by using MS Paint and Picasa. In order to reduce the size of my images, I use Image Resizer, an XP Power Toy.
So maybe my Custom Avatar wasn’t so cheap. It cost me 3 glasses of wine.
Well, I do like most of your avatar renditions. I was referring to the oddcast deal that speaks what you type. Some people get this avatar, but you have to pay for it. Talk to you later.
Aaah. I didn’t even think about the fact that Oddcast is for avatars! Thanks for the clarification. Well, you gave me an idea for a post, always valuable!
Two thumbs up on your avatar from the peanut gallery! It’s so you!