vangirl: (Default)
undead vampiric blue spacegoat. in plate. ([personal profile] vangirl) wrote in [community profile] team_van2008-10-25 02:39 pm

glorious; tutorial 01

Since I love [livejournal.com profile] illegalism so much, I'll do my first tutorial! :D

We'll be going from this: to this: in six easy steps~


First of all, you'll need a base, either one you cropped yourself or from some other kind soul who offers them. I found that iconning can be pretty difficult when you don't have a base image, so don't forget this step!




Now you have your image! It looks really boring and dull doesn't it? To brighten things up a bit duplicate the image and then set the top layer to Overlay 100%. You should get something like this:



Fantastic! Sometimes though, depending on your base image, it can end up too bright or too sharp that way. If that happens, just mess around with the opacity until you get something that looks good.


However, it's still kind of boring. To fix that, we'll take this texture from [livejournal.com profile] threeeyespei and set it over the icon at Linear Burn 100%.




Oh, dramatic shadows~ Lets make it even more dramatic by setting it to greyscale. You can do this easily by creating a #000000 (aka black) fill layer set to Color 100%.




Crazily enough, it actually looks like it got a bit boring again, without all the dramatic colors. But that can be easily fixed by using the eraser and getting rid of the bits of the black layer over Arietta's eyes. It should wind up looking something like this:




And voila! You have you're very dramatic, shadowy icon of fear! Just in time for Halloween! You can probably call it quits here after this step if you wanted to, but I think the empty space next to Arietta's head needs to be filled. I'll just take this texture from [livejournal.com profile] cielo_icons and set it to Linear Dodge 70% (so that it's not too bright and takes away from the rest of the icon.)

The final product will look like this!:




And there you go! You made an icon through the wonders of layer and texture abuse! What fun! :D
ext_148661: (Colm)

[identity profile] misheard.livejournal.com 2008-10-25 07:25 pm (UTC)(link)
Very nice~ I made a couple of icons out of this, but this one is my favorite:
Image

Thank you for the tutorial!
karel: (volke; wishing)

[personal profile] karel 2008-10-26 03:09 am (UTC)(link)
Whoa thanks, that was mad fast! XD Here's what I got out of it: