My avatar is from Mega Man 4 title screen. This is how it originally looked like.
I shrunk the original graphics a bit, created a smooth gradient and added a blinking animation.
I have no idea why I chose it, other than being a fan of Mega Man NES games back when Mega Man 3 was new. The animation was just something I wanted to do.
Later on, when I introduced the concept of mood avatars on this forum, I took a new screenshot from Mega Man 4, this time unscaled, and created a custom program which dynamically changes the palette according to options given in PHP URL parameters.
. These appear in my posts today.
The different colors were chosen to intuitively reflect the moods present in the post's text. Color of the body, color of the shadow, color of the greebles and color of the ear-interior were all carefully chosen. However, color-to-feeling associations are largely culture dependent, so what is obvious to me is unfortunately much less obvious to others.
I have a few other avatars as well, but most are variations on this theme.
Some of the others are event-related, such as the Hanukah candelabrum.
In my profile appears the current default avatar (not used anywhere else), which is this:
[img_left]
http://bisqwit.iki.fi/fliers/avatar/owner/glcav.png[/img_left]
It is a cropped section of my desktop background picture, which
also appears in the beginning of my most recent YouTube videos.
I just felt inspired to do it one day.
One day I came across Portrait Illustrator Creator, and I experimented with it and created a completely new set of avatars.
The new set was based on variations of this picture:
, such as:
After negative feedback, I discontinued using that set though.
It did however resurface two years ago in an April Fools prank on tasvideos, whereupon I used Egypt-based avatars such as these two:
. A variation thereof appears currently on my YouTube account.
The scene does occur, yes, but the camera and other elements are differently positioned.
Don't tell anyone!