Invictus (July 23, 2002) - I was reading my much battered copy of "Immortal Poetry" a month or so ago when I stumbled across the 1875 poem "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley (full text of which is included, unchanged, in the collage). Must have read it before, but having just watched Spike fighting in the Spooky Cave of Doom, made more of an impression on me this time! The general brutalized defiance of it probably would have probably recommended it to me for a Spike collage even if the neon light of the word "soul" hadn't been flashing quite so brightly. Read somewhere that it was considered "vulgar" and "usually deplored by critics"; that kinda miffed me for a while (how dare those critics criticize something I like? <wink>), but on second thought, that works for Spike too, doesn't it? "Invictus" means "unconquered", btw. I collected a lot of screen caps for this one, fighty ones, smirky ones, posturing ones, but in the end, decided to keep it simple with the focus on the two main caps, both from Two to Go, as he's gathering himself to jump back at the flame-fisted "walking action figure". On these, I used the diffuse blur filter (grain set to 0) with a very light blue, followed by some playing with the levels to bring back the contrast, to give it that kind of glowy highlighted look. The little picture down on the bottom right corner is also from the same scene as the main caps, where he catches the flaming fist ("badmovebadmovebadmove!"). And of course the 3 little ones on the left are from the very end of Grave, when he gets his soul back. The tree is from a BBoA stock pic, but was inspired by the use of a similar picture during the episode itself, as Spike's walking across the sand to the cave. That picture cut off the top of the tree though, so I decided to just find something similar. It was originally all red and sun-setty, but I changed it to blue to match the scene. The title font is "Engravers MT" and the poem itself is in "Book Antiqua". I used a little wind filter / motion blur filter on the left Spike; the other little streaks you see over on the left and coming up from the line at the bottom right are custom brushes from a fabulous set (set 3) I just acquired from roshiweb.com (some really pretty eye-candy on that site, btw, worth a visit even if you're not interested in brushes). All in all, I'm pretty pleased with how this one came out. It's simpler than I had originally envisioned, but I think it works, allows you to concentrate on actually reading the poem...