Hi anon! Admin Liza here. Welcome to FYNB!

I’m glad you like the aesthetic posts! We actually made a list at the start of the summer and split them up between myself and Admin Liz, because we thought it would be too much for one person to do alone (and also because we both really, really wanted to do the posts for our faves). I can’t speak for Liz, but of all the things we’ve made for the hiatus, I honestly think those were the most fun to do.

I used a few different image sources. The main ones were Screencapped.net (for all the images from the show itself), Google Image search, and Pixabay (thank you Liz for introducing me to that excellent source!). Pixabay is a site for free, high-quality photos and graphics, and Google Images now has that nifty little feature that allows users to filter to only content licensed for re-use, so that made it a lot easier to find images without infringing upon someone’s artistic rights or wishes regarding their work.

I also used Adobe Photoshop, and a template that I created with guides to show the slots for each image. I saved that and used it every time, so that made it easier to make them mostly uniform. I’m sure you could accomplish the same thing with GIMP, the open-source alternative to Photoshop.

Then I just…dragged, dropped, resized, and cropped the images into place. I added color filters to some and upped the brightness on others to create a more unified look across all the different images (for instance, in the recent Kelly Burkhardt post I desaturated a lot of the more colorful images). Once I was satisfied with the way the whole thing looked, I saved it as a JPEG and queued it up for posting.

If you were referring to how I decided on which images to use/searched for those images, I…don’t know what to tell you. I had nothing like a coherent process for that. For some I had specific objects I knew I wanted to include, like Kelly and her awesome weapons and the still of Marie. For others, I had to kind of just…think of some words or phrases that made me think of the character and search for that until I found something that clicked. Some were a lot harder to come up with images for than others. And for a lot of the quotes I would type in “quotes about ______” and spend way more time than I’d like to admit finding a quote or snippet of a quote that worked.

Granted, this is just my own process. Liz did half of these as well, and her process may have been very different!

Thanks for the great question, Anon!