The 'My Pictures' Top 20

In my seemingly unending vanity, I have decided to to a top twenty of the pictures in my 'My Pictures' folder. I've been toying with this idea for ages, and it's only now, as Blogger has improved its user-friendliness when uploading images, that I have resolved to quit jibber-jabbering and get on with it like a good little boy. There will be a lot of images of me; this is because I'm the only readily-available model I have when I get some of these photo ideas, and because many of these were made so that I could have a cool Facebook profile picture. You should learn a lot about me. Expect weirdness.

20. Where's Will?

This picture was made for this blog, quite literally. I placed myself into this picture using a dated piece of photo-editing software called Adobe PhotoDeluxe Home Edition 4.0. I like it because it's hard to find me in, but when you do, you're unable to ignore my grinning face leering at you. Hee hee hee.

19. A downright creepy picture.

I must have been a bit down when I did this; sometimes, when I'm feeling depressed, I like my internet accounts to reflect that. It's a bit unnerving to look at, to be honest - I think I was genuinely miserable when this picture was taken, because there's nothing staged about that expression. The bleakness of the image. The shadow obscuring the eyes, sucking any possible emotion from the face like two black holes. Sorry, I got a bit carried away there.

A lot of these pictures might be slightly grainy, by the way; my webcam is responsible for that. I personally like the effect, which is why I haven't binned it yet.

18. Another weird 'self-portrait'.

This picture has a bit more of a sense of humour. That crazed look in my eyes isn't real (that I can recall). I just felt like doing a funny picture for Facebook. Check out the little beard, though! Now that's real. I have grown a bit of a moustache since, just so's you know. I doubt you care, but to blazes with what you care about.

17. Fraser Kerr.

(NOTE) If, like this picture, there's too much wasted space on either side of this picture by giving it its own line, I'll just bung it to the side, and type next to it.

Fraser Kerr. The one chap I knew from Year 7-Year 11 that I couldn't find a fault with. By this, I don't mean to say that I'm a nitpicky old critic of a pessimist - you know how nearly everyone, even the nicest people you know, has some sort of flaw, some unimportant chink in their armour, that you usually ignore? Fraser didn't. Well, not to my knowledge. An all round nice bloke. Everyone I know, who knew Fraser, misses him.

He's not dead, by the way. Sorry - the last paragraph sounded like an obituary. He just didn't join us in Sixth Form. But he was an all-round nice chap, and I think it's about time he was given the recognition he deserves. Hence this article, in a blog that hardly anybody reads. Ahem.

If you look closely, you'll see that his face is ever so slightly weird-looking. I was trying to trace over the photo in Paint, but thankfully gave up while that ludicrous project was still in its infancy. Unfortunately, I forgot to save a backup copy of the original picture. It still looks like him, though, so I used it for this.

If you miss Fraser, comment on this post, and I'll try and pass them all on to him somehow. As a sort of Christmas present.

16. Dance, Monkey Boy.

The only reason this isn't nearer the #1 spot is that my head was superimposed somewhat haphazardly, so the man's hat doesn't seem to be sitting on my head properly. I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to these things, and that got on my nerves. I absolutely adore the picture this is based on, though, so that's here too, at the #8 slot. The original organ grinder was my Facebook profile pic for a while, even though I wasn't in it, I loved it so much. I think that's what made me do this.

I actually did this one today, on Adobe PhotoDeluxe, but the age of the program meant that it was difficult to save the cropped head for future editing. Possible, but difficult. Too difficult for me to waste my time doing. Not wasting time, says the blogger. Hah!

15. Here comes Ross!

Oh, he's going to hate me for doing this. But I do it nonetheless, and laugh heartily whilst doing so.

Ross Milnes is as much of a friend as a colleague - through working together, in and out of school, we have both developed our comedy and our collective sense of humour to impressive levels. I will work with Ross in the future. That's a dead cert.

I made this on Microsoft Word, believe it or not. Cue the completely uncalled for 'photo editing made easy' tutorial... 

I took his photo, put it into Paint, coloured over the whole picture in bright blue except his face, saved the image as a BMP (bitmap) image - that's very important - and imported the image into Word, where I used the 'set transparent colour' tool to make the blue area transparent. I then made a body with the 'AutoShapes' tool, copied and pasted it all back into Paint, and saved it as a JPEG image. I uploaded this image onto an amazing photo-editing website called Picnik, where I tweaked the contrast, added a vignette and slightly caricatured the face, and hey presto!

I'd better add a disclaimer:

DISCLAIMER: Ross is better-looking than this picture portrays him. But only slightly.

14. Aw, bless.

The smile in this picture is contagious. I can't help smiling whenever I see this - it's a proper Stan Laurel smile. This is deliberate, because I love Laurel & Hardy and I wanted the picture to have an essence of them in it. This is not the reason for its black and white, Picnik-vignetted nature. I'm just old-fashioned like that. The slightly-too-small hat probably inspired me to pull this face, as Stan's hat never fit properly.

13. My first 3D render.

You'll have probably seen this before - I posted it up not long ago. I made this on a glorious little gem of a 3D program called Blender (I can't be arsed to create a link - find it yourself), using a tutorial I found on the internet (again, sod the link). However, I did deviate from the tutorial at one stage, denting the spherical head slightly to give the man some sort of face. Well, it makes my hat-wearing stick man with his arms up unique from all the other hundreds of hat-wearing stick men with their arms up that that tutorial has spawned, doesn't it?

12. The General and I.

Usually, I would correct the grammatical incorrectness of the title and change it to 'The General and Me', but it's actually a subtle reference to 'The King and I'. Well, not very subtle any more.

The little yellow chap on my shoulder is General Bertram B. Brunswick, a close friend of mine. Want to know more about Bertie? Check out his Facebook profile, and ask him anything. I can't be bothered to write about him here (sorry Bertie, but this blog post is long enough as it is).

Tweaked in Picnik.

11. Distinctly arty.

Literally all of this was done in Picnik. That's how awesome that website is. Check it out.

By 'arty', I mean that the picture seems to have a point, a message that its trying to convey. Well, I say 'seems' - I know it does, 'cos I did it. It's a very frank portrayal of how I see myself - a clown, forcing a mask of jollity to hide the darker aspects of my personality. I wanted to make it look like a black and white picture, possibly on a wall, with the colours, the clown elements, spray-painted on like graffiti. It makes the picture look defaced, as if it's not entirely self-inflicted.

There's a lot going on with this picture and I could go on for paragraphs and paragraphs, but I won't bore you. I won't bore you, says the blogger. Hah!

10. Sweet, yet slightly sinister.

I love my gormless, child-like expression here - this was my Facebook profile picture for ages. However, it does look like a police mug-shot; once viewed from this angle, this picture doesn't seem so friendly any more. The concealed evil the picture implies is really rather disconcerting, in a 'Hannibal Lecter' sort of way (see #6).

9. Monochrome me.

I really like this picture, because it was taken with a really good camera, which meant that during the editing process, details such as the eyes and the hair suddenly took on a harsh but beautiful clarity. It almost looks like it was drawn with a pen. I achieved this effect using - yes, you guessed it - Picnik.

8. The Organ Grinder.

You'd be forgiven for thinking, based on the last twelve images, that this 'top 20' is for images that have been created by me. Well, that isn't the case - well, it wasn't the case before my self-obsessed narcissism got in the way - for the only parameter for the nominations is that they are in the 'My Pictures' folder of my computer. This lovely little picture escaped my selfish discrimination by being such a wonderful image. An organ grinder, complete with a little monkey, complete with a little hat. Just... glorious.

7. A 'professional' photo.

I believe it was Miss Emma Bowles who said to me on Facebook, regarding this picture, albeit the colour version, 'you look rather earnest in it'. I like that description. 'Earnest' is a word that I don't use nearly as much as I should, and it sums up this picture nicely.

This was not done professionally. I got a digital camera, put the timer on, and sat against my blank bedroom wall. Et voila, as I believe they say in France.

The initial detail and definition was so professional-looking, I popped the pic onto Picnik and played around with it, removing the colour (I looked very pink) and upping the contrast, until I got a really nice-looking portrait photo. Earnesty is the best policy!

Except that joke doesn't work because it's actually 'earnestness'. Yes, I tend to piss on my own bonfires, as it were.

6. Hello, Clarice...

It was a creepy photo before I altered it, but this is still the product of one of the longest Picniking sessions I have ever put myself through. I wanted to get the oil painting effect of that iconic Hannibal Lecter picture (right). However, I didn't want the similarities to be too obvious, so I resisted adding little simulated paint cracks and the crimson eyes. Instead, I went with faint, irregular vertical stripes, with very slight changes in tone in these areas. I'm not entirely sure what the stripes are meant to resemble, but they make the picture look more old-fashioned and less like a photograph (let alone one done on a crappy webcam).

Picnik, you've done it again!

5. And you thought 6 was scary.

Now, this one wasn't done in Picnik. It was created using a fun interactive promotional tool for the film 'Zombieland'. I usually detest the thought of doing something creative on something as vulgar as that (I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to think of an alternative word to 'vulgar', but couldn't, so sorry for sounding like a pompous tit), but the 'zombify-yourself' tool is actually rather good. I spent a good couple of hours on this, honing and perfecting my zombie double, putting far too much thought into aspects like 'how did that injury occur?' and 'which part of the face would be the most vulnerable to grazing?' Overall, a cracking picture.

My only query is this - how are the remains of my glasses staying on?

4. The Boy Who Quotes.

Not a real book. Just thought I'd clear that up first and foremost.

I strive for an authentic look with most of my art, and this is no exception. I had a creepy picture of a certain John P. Mahon, made it even more frightening on Picnik, and then decided that it looked like the cover of a horror novel. Hence this.

The text was just added on in Word, using WordArt. I often use Word for simple photo editing - it's surprisingly good at it, considering it's not its primary function and providing you know what buttons to press.

3. Ross & Will.

Not so much a picture in its own right as a screen-capture of a video, this nonetheless deserves a place in this line up because I love it. This one image single-handedly and effortlessly demonstrates why I believe Ross and I show so much potential as a comedy double-act. There's so much expression and character in this picture.

2. The Gang.

I'm the one on the far right.

Yes, that really is me. I went to great lengths to make the superimposed version of my good self look in-keeping with the style of the rest of the picture. My attire was suitable anyway (I tend to dress like that), and there happened to be a person where I ended up placing my cropped Will, in a similar pose to mine. This helped make me look like a natural inclusion to the picture, not disrupting the composition or looking at all out of place. Therefore, I decided to merge myself with the original chap somewhat - the trousers, from the knee down, belong to the fellow I usurped, as does the right hand (blackened to match my gloved left hand).

A bit of tweaking in Picnik later, and I look as though I was in the picture all along. Except I'm wearing a coat, scarf and bowler indoors. Maybe I walked in just as the picture was being done, and decided to hang around for a bit - I don't know.

1. Will Laurel.

Just look at it. As far as superimpositions go, it's magnificent.

I went to extra-special lengths to achieve a realistic image with this one. I examined how Stan Laurel was lit in the original photograph and took a photo of myself from exactly the same angle, with exactly the same lighting. That was the trick, really - everything else was just the routine crop-and-stick. But there is just something so unsettlingly realistic about this one. It requires you to zoom in on the picture to see the join - the resolution of my face is slightly higher than that of Mr Laurel's head.

Jesus Christ, is that the time? I'll be wrapping this up now, then.