TUTORIAL 03-- "it gets so hard"
well, minakochan asked me to make a tutorial, so i'm making one. this is for PS7. it'd be better if you knew more or less how to use the program, like the basics of the tools and stuff. pretty much image-intensive and beware, i REALLY talk too much.
please, PLEASE, don't make exact copies of this icon. just get the techniques and adjust them to your own style. the idea is that you learn what i'm THINKING when i make my icons so you can learn to reason with yours.
we'll be making this icon:
before anything else, here you have the layers palette, just in case you get lost.
i'd been itching to do a trio icon for quite some time, so i snagged this GoF pic (i resized it for this tutorial because the original one is huge):
and started working on it like a madwoman. lol. first thing i had to do was to get the trio together. i used the lasso tool with some feathering (i think it was set to 2, but i'm not so sure) to select ron & harry, like so:
it doesn't matter in this case that the edges of the selection aren't perfect; we're gonna take care of that soon, and it's all just grass anyway ^^;;;
now i copy-pasted the selection as a new layer and moved it to the left, to position the boys beside hermione. i also used the lasso tool w/ feathering again to delete any weird-looking edges, particularly ron's front-side which still had pieces of grass and leaves that covered hermione's torso, and on harry's legs the grass was greener than the normal grass, so i zoomed in to like 200-300%, selected those little pieces and deleted them. the result is a pretty smooth contour (the next pic is also resized).
now i selected the part i wanted to be my base (luckily the tree's covering ginny so i didn't have to put too much thought into it), copy-merged it, pasted it as a new image, and resized it to 100x100. what i did then was sharpen it (filter>sharpen>sharpen), but then it turned out to be a little over-sharpened (which is as bad as a blurry image), so i faded the sharpen filter by 50% (edit>fade). then i ran auto-contrast (image>adjustments>auto-contrast) on the image to make it clearer. and here's what i got:
now, this i do to almost every icon i make: duplicate the base (we'll call this new layer "blur"), up the brightness of the duplicate by 40% (by going to image>adjustments>brightness/contrast), and then apply a gaussian blur of radius 8 (filter>blur>gaussian blur) to it. like this:
and then set "blur" to soft light. this is what you get:
as you can see it is kinda dark, so i duplicated the base layer again and kept the new duplicate (we'll call it "screen") between "blur" and the base. then i set it to-- you guessed it-- screen.
but that was a little too bright... i don't like working with pics that are very bright because it takes many dark gradients and brushes to make the bright parts look good. so i lowered the opacity of "screen" to 70%, like so:
after this i decided to follow faerie_dance's raining like magic tutorial (which is really wonderful, BTW), and so for coloring i duplicated the base twice more, desaturating both (image>adjustments>desaturate) dragging both of those to the very top of all the layers.
the copy directly above "blur" (called "b&w1") was set to screen.
and the one in the very top (called "b&w2") i set to soft light.
next, there's an exclusion layer, which is a very useful trick if you want your colors to be somewhat faded. it's pretty famous, i guess most of you would know it by now so i'll go over it quickly. make a new layer at the very top and fill it with a dark blue color (#332557), then set it to exclusion.
after that, again following faerie_dance's tutorial i put at the very top this gradient by drave:
and set it to overlay:
then i made another new layer on top of everything and filled it with #FDE2C7. set that layer to multiply.
after that, i'm done using that one particular tutorial. but remember: faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance!
anyway, i wanted my icon to be a little more bluish/purplish, i used a part of this gorgeous texture from hybrid-genesis, pasted it as a new layer on top of everything...
...then set the blend mode to pin light.
using pin light is a pretty scary thing. like 80% of the time, when you set a layer to pin light you'll get something downright horrendous. the rest of the time, it just looks plain weird. but both of those can be easily solved: pin light is your friend, people! you have the force, use the force! ^.^
*cough, cough* ok... since that looks mostly... weird (those purple blobs were too much), i duplicated "b&w2", dragged the duplicate to the top (calling it "b&w3") and left the mode just the same-- soft light,
which is much better. then, for the light effect, i used part of a stock image of light that i got from teh_indy.
i usually set my images of light to either lighten or screen, sometimes even to pin or hard light, but it really depends on the image you have. this one i set to screen.
see that the ugly purple blob to the bottom-left side of the icon is now hidden by the light? i love these thingies ^___________^
ok, so the coloring was just perfect now, but there was still something a little off. i tried to make a border around it, but it just didn't click. so i decided to just cut off some of the area of the icon. i made a new layer, filled it with black (#000000) and moved it to the very bottom of the palette. then i moved every layer BUT this black layer 6px up, like so:
and then, in a new layer on top of everything else, i used, in black, a brush by ruuk:
in black, normal blend mode. so, TA-DA! we get our finished product.
it's pretty easy to do, really ^.^ i hope you found this tutorial useful, because i've certainly learned many things from other, more talented icon-makers through their tutorials, and i can't be anymore grateful, that's for sure. and while you're here, remember to check out my icons @ ickyblue!
please, PLEASE, don't make exact copies of this icon. just get the techniques and adjust them to your own style. the idea is that you learn what i'm THINKING when i make my icons so you can learn to reason with yours.
we'll be making this icon:
before anything else, here you have the layers palette, just in case you get lost.
i'd been itching to do a trio icon for quite some time, so i snagged this GoF pic (i resized it for this tutorial because the original one is huge):
and started working on it like a madwoman. lol. first thing i had to do was to get the trio together. i used the lasso tool with some feathering (i think it was set to 2, but i'm not so sure) to select ron & harry, like so:
it doesn't matter in this case that the edges of the selection aren't perfect; we're gonna take care of that soon, and it's all just grass anyway ^^;;;
now i copy-pasted the selection as a new layer and moved it to the left, to position the boys beside hermione. i also used the lasso tool w/ feathering again to delete any weird-looking edges, particularly ron's front-side which still had pieces of grass and leaves that covered hermione's torso, and on harry's legs the grass was greener than the normal grass, so i zoomed in to like 200-300%, selected those little pieces and deleted them. the result is a pretty smooth contour (the next pic is also resized).
now i selected the part i wanted to be my base (luckily the tree's covering ginny so i didn't have to put too much thought into it), copy-merged it, pasted it as a new image, and resized it to 100x100. what i did then was sharpen it (filter>sharpen>sharpen), but then it turned out to be a little over-sharpened (which is as bad as a blurry image), so i faded the sharpen filter by 50% (edit>fade). then i ran auto-contrast (image>adjustments>auto-contrast) on the image to make it clearer. and here's what i got:
now, this i do to almost every icon i make: duplicate the base (we'll call this new layer "blur"), up the brightness of the duplicate by 40% (by going to image>adjustments>brightness/contrast), and then apply a gaussian blur of radius 8 (filter>blur>gaussian blur) to it. like this:
and then set "blur" to soft light. this is what you get:
as you can see it is kinda dark, so i duplicated the base layer again and kept the new duplicate (we'll call it "screen") between "blur" and the base. then i set it to-- you guessed it-- screen.
but that was a little too bright... i don't like working with pics that are very bright because it takes many dark gradients and brushes to make the bright parts look good. so i lowered the opacity of "screen" to 70%, like so:
after this i decided to follow faerie_dance's raining like magic tutorial (which is really wonderful, BTW), and so for coloring i duplicated the base twice more, desaturating both (image>adjustments>desaturate) dragging both of those to the very top of all the layers.
the copy directly above "blur" (called "b&w1") was set to screen.
and the one in the very top (called "b&w2") i set to soft light.
next, there's an exclusion layer, which is a very useful trick if you want your colors to be somewhat faded. it's pretty famous, i guess most of you would know it by now so i'll go over it quickly. make a new layer at the very top and fill it with a dark blue color (#332557), then set it to exclusion.
after that, again following faerie_dance's tutorial i put at the very top this gradient by drave:
and set it to overlay:
then i made another new layer on top of everything and filled it with #FDE2C7. set that layer to multiply.
after that, i'm done using that one particular tutorial. but remember: faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance! faerie_dance!
anyway, i wanted my icon to be a little more bluish/purplish, i used a part of this gorgeous texture from hybrid-genesis, pasted it as a new layer on top of everything...
...then set the blend mode to pin light.
using pin light is a pretty scary thing. like 80% of the time, when you set a layer to pin light you'll get something downright horrendous. the rest of the time, it just looks plain weird. but both of those can be easily solved: pin light is your friend, people! you have the force, use the force! ^.^
*cough, cough* ok... since that looks mostly... weird (those purple blobs were too much), i duplicated "b&w2", dragged the duplicate to the top (calling it "b&w3") and left the mode just the same-- soft light,
which is much better. then, for the light effect, i used part of a stock image of light that i got from teh_indy.
i usually set my images of light to either lighten or screen, sometimes even to pin or hard light, but it really depends on the image you have. this one i set to screen.
see that the ugly purple blob to the bottom-left side of the icon is now hidden by the light? i love these thingies ^___________^
ok, so the coloring was just perfect now, but there was still something a little off. i tried to make a border around it, but it just didn't click. so i decided to just cut off some of the area of the icon. i made a new layer, filled it with black (#000000) and moved it to the very bottom of the palette. then i moved every layer BUT this black layer 6px up, like so:
and then, in a new layer on top of everything else, i used, in black, a brush by ruuk:
in black, normal blend mode. so, TA-DA! we get our finished product.
it's pretty easy to do, really ^.^ i hope you found this tutorial useful, because i've certainly learned many things from other, more talented icon-makers through their tutorials, and i can't be anymore grateful, that's for sure. and while you're here, remember to check out my icons @ ickyblue!