I chose to do one of the recommended assignments which is One Story / Four Icons, worth 2.5 stars.

I knew I wanted to do my icons based on The Wire Season 2, Episode 9: Stray Rounds since I thought there were some iconic objects in that episode.

I used Pixlr to put together my icon story and I used The Noun Project to find icons. I thought the four most iconic objects from Stray Rounds were Ziggy’s duck (RIP), McNulty’s european man purse, Bodie and Stringer’s duffel bag, and the barrels of paint chips that were actually Columbian drugs. So I searched The Noun Project website for ducks, purses, gym bags (duffel bag wasn’t the best keyword), and barrels. These are the four icons I ultimately picked.

Icon citations:

Bag designed by iconsmind.com from the Noun Project
Bag designed by Erik Wagner from the Noun Project
Barrel designed by Karthik M from the Noun Project
Duck designed by Isabel Martínez Isabel from the Noun Project

To make my icon story, I downloaded the four icons and imported them into Pixlr. Then, I created my background for the story by using the paint can to make the canvas blue and using a small radial white gradient on top of it. Then, I used the water swirl filter to make the background have a slight wave. The background is supposed to represent how the whole season is taking place down at the docks on the water. Next, I edited the individual icons. I filled in the duffel bag to be red like the one in the episode, I inverted the colors on the duck icon so the duck would be white instead of black, like the real duck, I filled in the purse to be brown and black, since the real one was brown, and then I filled in the barrel to be a silverly grey, also like the real ones. The only icon that gave me trouble was the purse. I had to manually make some of the pixels on the purse wither brown or black since the paint can wasn’t picking up all of the purse pixels.

Lastly, I selected all of my icons, copied and pasted them onto the background, resized them, and then added my text stating which episode these icons are representing. Even though it is a simpler assignment, I tried to make it more interesting/complex by adding in the different colors.