icon concrit

[jaydesummers]

Well, to be honest, I am a bit discouraged from making icons at the moment. This mainly has a lot to do with entering icontests and I never, EVER place. ;-; It just makes it float about in my head that "haha, your icons suck! hahaha" and well...

What the heck am I doing wrong?Concrit please? D: If you're going to come over to this post and just

Comments

[ex_brandi510]

Hm.... I've looked through all of the posts in your most recent entries, and the things I see are the following.

Actually, before I get into anything, I feel as if I should say that your icon not placing in contests doesn't mean much of anything. I've noticed that in most contests, whatever icons completely follow the most recent trends are the ones that place, regardless of the creative quality of other icons involved.

But yes. Back to some critique:

Text - I noticed that a lot of your text looks kind of strange, and I think I know the reason why. When you use exclusion layers, and layers involved with soft/hard light, it can make your text seem to bleed. An example are these ones:

[jaydesummers]

Brandi, I love you so, so, so, SO much for this!

- That Setzer icon I don't even know why I posted it because I know that I went overboard on it. =\ It's not one of my best icons, I'll admit.

- Would you believe if I told you that the icon of Riku was actually textured like that from the official art? I just went a big overboard with the blues to be honest.

- o.O What the heck is an aspect ratio anyway? That doesn't make sense to me to be honest. D:

- I'll give some colouring tuts a try but I've been trying to get away from using too much blue. And if I do use a blue layer, I've been lowering the opacity super, super low. :B

- Hehehe, I went back to check on the official art that I used for the daydream believer icon and the art is actually blue. xD;;

I think I'm done with icontests for a bit. And thank you for the concrit! ^_^ ♥

[ex_brandi510]

Aspect ratio is basically getting everything in proper proportion. The Zack icon of yours I posted up above looks a bit too stretched out and not wide enough, in my opinion. He looks like he's been stretched thin! A lot of the time it's caps and official art scans that come like that, and it's a pain to mess around with the image until you get it to look right. haha but yeah, a complicated term for something pretty simple. :D

hehe and I reccommend not using color tutorials, just play with things on your own. A lot of times, when we use coloring tutorials, I think people lose their own creativity in name of copying a tutorial to make icons "look good". Just play around with layers and colors on your own for a bit. :D And...stay away from selective coloring, if you haven't started using that yet. A lot of icon disasters come from selective coloring. ♥

[chaoticchicken]

Alright, some straight to the point tips! Or stuff in my opinion. I dunno.

First off:

[uprise]

Your text is too SOLID for the pictures. Try various colors, textures, etc. Also, when doing text layers, try changing the layer type. I often use "Overlay" or "Linear Burn".

And when resizing, make sure the image is all one size, first. Don't get something like 150x167 and try to resize it to 100x100 with "constrain proportions". Cut off the extra pixels to 150x150 and then resize to 100x100. It'll make the image fit the icon better. (This goes with all sizes and all graphics. If you want bigger pictures in the icons, crop off the extra pixels to a comfortable point and try resizing. The less there is to smash into the 100x100 or whatever size, the bigger and higher quality the graphic will be.)

Also, remember not all icons need text. You can use the mood of the icon to fit it to the category you want. But, you can still use brushes. Tiny text brushes and such work well, too. Or try randomizing the sizes/fonts but make sure they fit with the icon.

I'm also a big fan of a lot of textures. I have a lot of communities like 100x100_brushes and texturize to