WordPress Archive with Icons

Hey there,

my request might sound stupid, but I just couldn’t find a way to do what I wanna do by going through a lot of Documentation, plugin searches etc. Also, I couldn’t find any examples yet.

I would like to do a WordPress archive that looks something like that:
http://www.precious-forever.com/wp-archive-with-icons.gif

So it gives month+year as headlines, and shows an image for each posting within that month. The posting title only appears on mouseover.

Or as an alternative:
http://www.precious-forever.com/wp-archive-with-icons-b.gif

So the years are separate headlines.

Can anybody hint me to an example where this has already been done? Or give me some tips how to do it or at least where to start/have a look? Or maybe let me know if this is theoretically possible with WordPress? 🙂

Any feedback would be highly appreciated.

Thanks + best regards from Hamburg,
Christophe