| tutorial: dean from heart
original image
made with photoshop cs5
requested by: calrissian18 for icon_talk
original image
made with photoshop cs5
requested by: calrissian18 for icon_talk
step 01 - cap and base prep
I was kind of on a silhouette kick when I made this icon, but I did the silhouette effect a little differently for this one than I did for the Dean icon I posted earlier. I had a cap already in mind when I set out to make this icon, which was this one from Heart. I have an action saved in Photoshop to resize caps on the fly, so I applied it to the full size cap which resized it down to 550px, thus giving me an easier canvas to work on.
I'm pretty sure I did the silhouette first with the cap at its 550 size and then pasted it onto the 100x100 and went from there. I don't think I did any kind of base prep for this one.
step 02 - creating the silhouette
To create the silhouette of Dean, I used Photoshop's Pen tool. I won't go into how to use the Pen Tool. You should be pretty familiar with Photoshop and it's tools if you want to follow along with this tutorial because I won't be giving out any specifics, sorry. So I grabbed the Pen Tool by pressing P on my keyboard. Then I went up to the tool bar at the top of my screen and selected Shape Layers from the options. This is what your options in the tool bar should look like:
Next, I pressed D on my keyboard to reset my background & foreground colors to their default settings. Foreground (the top swatch) should be set to Black and background (the bottom swatch) should be set to White. Next, using the Pen Tool, I created an outline around Dean by clicking around his entire body (note: I zoomed in a couple of times by pressing CTRL and the + key). I knew that it didn't have to be perfect as this thing would be going onto a 100x100 so any mistakes or whatnot wouldn't really show up too much. Now, as I started to select Dean, Photoshop started filling in his body with black, which made it difficult for me to see what I was doing, so I went to the Shape layer (which was created right after I started selecting Dean) in my layers palette and lowered the opacity of the layer to @ 40% so I could select Dean properly, getting all the details (his fist in the air for one). It's important to note that I did not flatten my layers at this point, that's important for the next step. And here is our selection with the opacity of the Shape Layer at 100%.
Next, I created a new 100x100 and dragged the image of Dean onto the canvas by selecting the Shape layer and dropping it onto the blank canvas (which should be transparent or have no color background). And I now have this:
Next, I wanted sort of a simple background for Dean, one that would give enough space around him for me to add text and stuff, so I selected this texture by mm3butterfly, from her Skybound set. The framing is what drew me to it in the first place. I didn't like the gray color, so I added a Color Fill layer in #d56e40 and set it to Lighten, for a nice orange color. Next, I dragged and dropped the texture onto the 100x100 and placed it under the image of Dean. I then rotated it a couple of times until I finally came up with this:
step 03 - coloring and text
I don't remember the exact steps I took for the coloring of this icon, so I'm going to guess that it ended up being something close to this:
For the text, I used the font Arial in bold at 13px size in white ("for the") and in yellow ("win") and then at a smaller size in white again ("chester"), that came out to something like this, the final product:
As always, if there's any confusion or something is not clear, you are free to ask me about it in comments. And sorry this got so wordy, lol!
→ comments are lovely, but not required!
→ feel free to comment if you're not sure about something here!
→ I'm still taking questions @ Ask the Maker and you can find my thread H E R E.