Squeakie's Avatar ...animated

(Click "Download" to see the full-sized image)

Here's a larger version of an avatar I just finished for my very good friend Squeakie (from another site), featuring a Big Brown Bat and some cake!! Mmmmmmm caaaake!!

I had originally planned more for this piece (a common problem of mine)... The eyes were supposed to dart around like a hyper chameleon's and then focus forward as the cake appeared. I also wanted the popping thought bubble to be more fluid and billowy... The frame count was getting way out of hand though, and I ended up having to cut the avatar's color palette in half (in order to keep the file size below the required 25 KB limit).

Photo reference for the cake came from cookiemadness.net (the original photo was of a slice of carrot cake).

EDIT - I inadvertently discovered that this image runs very slowly when viewed with "Internet Explorer".

After a little reading, it seems that this is actually a problem with IE6 (and possibly higher) and not the animation itself (as it runs perfectly in "Opera", "Netscape", "Firefox", my extremely outdated image viewing software, and I'm sure "Safari").

The kicker is that most people still use IE, so for most people this image will run slowly...

I'm hoping that I can find a solution for this little annoyance... In the meantime I suggest viewing the image with something other than Microsoft brand software.

Oh internet... It's always compatibility issues with you...