Im having some fun experimenting with gif making tonight hope you don't mind the animation. This shows the iterative creation process of our current thumbnail.
I kind of knew what I wanted in my minds eye with a front facing llama to juxtapose the old thumbnail sideways view. I went searching for AI generated llama images since thats fitting of the fourm and copyright free public domain (as far as I understand).
The original image was generated by Stable Diffusion. I like it a lot as is but to be a good thumbnail for the community it needed to be easily recognizable and renderable on small screens. First picked the color.The purple is more bright and slightly reddish in tinge which helps with pop. Then I expanded the neck to fill to the bottom.
All those detail lines created nasty artifacting when compressed on small phone icons of the community, They needed to go. I left the chin hair lines and eye lines to not make it too simple. The nose ridge outline was thickened for some recognizable detail.
Finally for coloring, I used the old thumbnail llama as a pallette to respect our heritage. In the community update post I said we shouldnt associate with r/localllama but that might be too far. We share a history, motivation, use cases, and hopes.
This all took around two hours hand editing with GIMP tools.
Today I learned the basics of animation in GIMP and made it blink!
