We Were Made for This (Tutorial)
Hola! Long time, no tutorial, huh? Well, a couple days ago tinebrella mentioned she might like to see a tutorial for this Supernatural icon, and I will kind of do anything for Miss Val so...TUTORIAL TIME!
TUTORIAL: We Were Made for This
Program: Photoshop 7
Level of Difficulty: Easy
Tools: Blending modes, layer masks, shape tool, variations, textures, & text.
Choosing your screencaps
Screencaps in question: [Dean] & [Castiel]
Both caps came from home of the nutty's galleries. That's pretty much where I get all of my Supernatural screencaps from!
Why these two screencaps? Well, to be honest, mostly because I already had them sitting on my computer! I had tried a few weeks previous to make something that had to do with Dean/Castiel/Anna, and I had collected several screencaps of the three for that specific purpose. That particular creation never came to pass, but I didn't get rid of the screencaps because, usually, my internet gets capped at the end of the month, we go down to dial up speed for about a week, and if I want to icon, I need spare caps lying around with easy access. Cool story, bro.
At any rate, these two screencaps fit together nicely, I think. You've got Dean looking down and Castiel looking up which means a lot of things symbolically, and so putting them together meshed well. Plus this adds a compositional uniformity to everything; they are connected via line of sight. Or at least, no pun intended (or maybe it is, idk) here, that's the way I see it.
On their own, I probably wouldn't be able to make much out of them that was interesting, but they are clean enough to make something cool if they are layered together which is what I decided to do.
Layering/Blocking the screencaps
As I mentioned, Dean is looking down while Castiel is looking up so I wanted to layer them so that they met each other's line of sight more or less. So Dean gets placed on top for this reason, and Castiel gets placed on the bottom.
The first issue is, of course, that in this formation, Dean is flush against the top of the icon which looks strange and cramped; so I moved him down a bit. Also, the straight, harsh line of the blocking didn't really please me at this point though. Sometimes that works for me and other times, it just doesn't. So I thought: why not reshape my corners? Soften it up a bit! So the method I was taught to make rounded corners goes thusly:
1. You want to select your shape tool. It looks like this! You should select the rounded rectangle tool for this job.
2. Place the shape on your canvas. It should come up as its own layer, but on the off chance it doesn't for you, go back and create a new layer and then begin again. The shape should cover the entire area you want to give rounded corners but leave out the edges where you want the corners rounded. So cover everything except the very outside edges of the bottom of the Dean screencap, in this case.
3. Right click; make selection. This should highlight the entire shape area.
4. Go to the screencap of Dean and add a layer mask.
5. Make your shape layer invisible or delete it if you feel like it. You won't need it anymore.
Prepping your base
Okay, before I started my actual coloring or adding any of the fun details that really make this icon, I had to do certain things to my base and tweak it until I was ready to move on. So let's just hit on those things in really quick succession, okay?
1. Copy merged/stamp all layers onto a new layer. Blur it to kingdom come. Set it to screen.
2. Stamp all layers onto a new layer again EXCEPT for the screen layer. Set this layer to soft light.
3. Add a black and white gradient. Set it to soft light. I've recently started doing this because I kind of want to dabble with muted coloring. It's, um, not really going well? But, in any case, this helps add contrast back into your icon and also bleaches away a lot of the colors within it. So you are left with a more muted, desolate coloring atmosphere. Which, hey, would have worked well with this icon if I had left it alone, but...
4. Add a Hue/Saturation layer. Why add saturation back in after I just took most of it away? I DON'T KNOW. Sometimes I do weird, contradictory things. I am sure you can relate. Anyway, pump up the master saturation to +15. It doesn't shift the colors in any drastic way, but it does add a smidge more color which I suppose I used as a guide later on when I actually attacked the coloring portion of this icon.
5. You can probably see the biggest issue with the icon right now. Castiel is so much darker than Dean. Makes sense. He is in a dark building, and Dean's outside. But I needed a little more coherency in my lighting so I made a curves layer, and used the RBG curve to brighten Castiel until I was happy. Obviously, I then had to mask this away from Dean. Adjustment layers come with their own mask so just take whatever brush you like on black and mask away!
Coloring and Details
Boom! We are onto the fun part! Now is when I go crazy with textures, coloring, and other details! They are all kind of mixed in together so be ready to bounce form one to the other!
1. I used this texture by mm3butterfly which is one of my current favorites. I duplicated it so it appears twice in my layer palette, and I set both layers to screen. Feel the grunge!
2. Next is this texture by fprintmoon. I desaturated it because I wasn't interested in the blue, and then I had to free transform it so that it fit the size of my canvas. Then I set it to screen. The grey side, obviously, covered the subjects of my icon and looked a bit silly; thus, I pulled out a handy dandy mask again! I masked off the majority of the right side of the texture, leaving only a small line of grey in Castiel's section of the icon. Why this texture masked like this? Okay, well, I like lines. That sounds silly, I know. But what I mean is, lines are a great tool to connect two otherwise unconnected elements. When I am doing a split screen icon like this, I use lines quite often to draw the eye between the two or to emphasize their connection in some way. Okay but really I just love lines and borders. They are awesome.
3. Okay at this point I figured it looked pretty cool so I went into coloring. Usually I would have colored before this point or during the texturization process (because using textures to color is the best), but I was making this icon specifically for the 'yellow' challenge at icon-crack so I left the coloring til last because I wanted to put it off as long as possible. Give me a color scheme and inevitably, I will try and do anything but that color scheme. Anyway, in order to achieve the yellow coloring in question I stamped onto a new layer, and then I opened Variations. Variations can be clunky, yes, and it does add color overall so if you are looking for something subtle, this might not be your tool. However, I was, in fact, looking to beat my icon over the head with yellow so variations is perfect. Basically, I just clicked on 'more yellow' until I was happy. Awesome.
4. At this point, the icon is okay, but I felt it was a little boring so I wanted to add some more grunge. I took a texture from the large texture set here and set it to Screen. It probably needed resizing and moving around a bit to get what I wanted, but that's pretty much it.
5. STAMP THEM LAYERS AND SHARPEN. WOOO! I use Paint Daubs to sharpen which is awesome because, hey, tinebrella taught me you could do that. FUNNY HOW SHE IS EVERYWHERE IN THIS TUTORIAL. If you want to learn how sharpening this way works, I would check out anything Val has ever done, but most importantly, the sharpening workshop she did at icons-concrit!
6. Last step! Okay, here's the thing about me and lines. Lines beg me to add text! I don't know why. Anyway, I am fairly certain the line of text I used was from a song by Train as I was most likely listening to them during the making of this icon. My current playlist is just...Train, Ricki-Lee, and Roxette. Because of reasons. Anyway, the font here is Grant's Ghosts which is probably available from Da Font. Anyway, I really like it so it has appeared on several of my icons lately. In case you are having trouble reading it for whatever reason, it says 'we were made for this'. THIS FITS DEAN AND CASTIEL. IT ISN'T JUST RANDOM, I SWEAR. Anyway, I placed the text along the line, obviously, and then I selected the color using the eye dropper tool.
And that's a wrap! Hope you had fun!
1. Yes, I've made this into a tutorial so, technically, re-making this icon exactly is fair game, but, as the maker, I would just rather you not. Make your own thing. It'll be cooler anyway!
2. Questions and additional tips and tricks are totally welcome. Hit up the comment section!
3. Requests for other guides/tutorials are welcome with the provision that I may not have time or the .psd saved to make your tutorial. Or I might only have half a .psd. I don't know. I'm weird.
4. Linking to this tutorial is a-okay. Especially if it is a tutorial rec list, and if it is, TELL ME ABOUT IT BECAUSE I LOVE TUTORIAL REC LISTS LIKE KIDS LOVE CANDY.
5. You can find the icon in question in this post, and you can find my other tutorials under the tutorial tag.
TUTORIAL: We Were Made for This
Program: Photoshop 7
Level of Difficulty: Easy
Tools: Blending modes, layer masks, shape tool, variations, textures, & text.
Choosing your screencaps
Screencaps in question: [Dean] & [Castiel]
![[Dean]](http://i.imgur.com/a9Gsd.jpg){kind=link}
![[Castiel]](http://i.imgur.com/uGm1n.jpg){kind=link}
Both caps came from home of the nutty's galleries. That's pretty much where I get all of my Supernatural screencaps from!
Why these two screencaps? Well, to be honest, mostly because I already had them sitting on my computer! I had tried a few weeks previous to make something that had to do with Dean/Castiel/Anna, and I had collected several screencaps of the three for that specific purpose. That particular creation never came to pass, but I didn't get rid of the screencaps because, usually, my internet gets capped at the end of the month, we go down to dial up speed for about a week, and if I want to icon, I need spare caps lying around with easy access. Cool story, bro.
At any rate, these two screencaps fit together nicely, I think. You've got Dean looking down and Castiel looking up which means a lot of things symbolically, and so putting them together meshed well. Plus this adds a compositional uniformity to everything; they are connected via line of sight. Or at least, no pun intended (or maybe it is, idk) here, that's the way I see it.
On their own, I probably wouldn't be able to make much out of them that was interesting, but they are clean enough to make something cool if they are layered together which is what I decided to do.
Layering/Blocking the screencaps
As I mentioned, Dean is looking down while Castiel is looking up so I wanted to layer them so that they met each other's line of sight more or less. So Dean gets placed on top for this reason, and Castiel gets placed on the bottom.
The first issue is, of course, that in this formation, Dean is flush against the top of the icon which looks strange and cramped; so I moved him down a bit. Also, the straight, harsh line of the blocking didn't really please me at this point though. Sometimes that works for me and other times, it just doesn't. So I thought: why not reshape my corners? Soften it up a bit! So the method I was taught to make rounded corners goes thusly:
1. You want to select your shape tool. It looks like this! You should select the rounded rectangle tool for this job.
2. Place the shape on your canvas. It should come up as its own layer, but on the off chance it doesn't for you, go back and create a new layer and then begin again. The shape should cover the entire area you want to give rounded corners but leave out the edges where you want the corners rounded. So cover everything except the very outside edges of the bottom of the Dean screencap, in this case.
3. Right click; make selection. This should highlight the entire shape area.
4. Go to the screencap of Dean and add a layer mask.
5. Make your shape layer invisible or delete it if you feel like it. You won't need it anymore.
Prepping your base
Okay, before I started my actual coloring or adding any of the fun details that really make this icon, I had to do certain things to my base and tweak it until I was ready to move on. So let's just hit on those things in really quick succession, okay?
1. Copy merged/stamp all layers onto a new layer. Blur it to kingdom come. Set it to screen.
2. Stamp all layers onto a new layer again EXCEPT for the screen layer. Set this layer to soft light.
3. Add a black and white gradient. Set it to soft light. I've recently started doing this because I kind of want to dabble with muted coloring. It's, um, not really going well? But, in any case, this helps add contrast back into your icon and also bleaches away a lot of the colors within it. So you are left with a more muted, desolate coloring atmosphere. Which, hey, would have worked well with this icon if I had left it alone, but...
4. Add a Hue/Saturation layer. Why add saturation back in after I just took most of it away? I DON'T KNOW. Sometimes I do weird, contradictory things. I am sure you can relate. Anyway, pump up the master saturation to +15. It doesn't shift the colors in any drastic way, but it does add a smidge more color which I suppose I used as a guide later on when I actually attacked the coloring portion of this icon.
5. You can probably see the biggest issue with the icon right now. Castiel is so much darker than Dean. Makes sense. He is in a dark building, and Dean's outside. But I needed a little more coherency in my lighting so I made a curves layer, and used the RBG curve to brighten Castiel until I was happy. Obviously, I then had to mask this away from Dean. Adjustment layers come with their own mask so just take whatever brush you like on black and mask away!
Coloring and Details
Boom! We are onto the fun part! Now is when I go crazy with textures, coloring, and other details! They are all kind of mixed in together so be ready to bounce form one to the other!
1. I used this texture by mm3butterfly which is one of my current favorites. I duplicated it so it appears twice in my layer palette, and I set both layers to screen. Feel the grunge!
2. Next is this texture by fprintmoon. I desaturated it because I wasn't interested in the blue, and then I had to free transform it so that it fit the size of my canvas. Then I set it to screen. The grey side, obviously, covered the subjects of my icon and looked a bit silly; thus, I pulled out a handy dandy mask again! I masked off the majority of the right side of the texture, leaving only a small line of grey in Castiel's section of the icon. Why this texture masked like this? Okay, well, I like lines. That sounds silly, I know. But what I mean is, lines are a great tool to connect two otherwise unconnected elements. When I am doing a split screen icon like this, I use lines quite often to draw the eye between the two or to emphasize their connection in some way. Okay but really I just love lines and borders. They are awesome.
3. Okay at this point I figured it looked pretty cool so I went into coloring. Usually I would have colored before this point or during the texturization process (because using textures to color is the best), but I was making this icon specifically for the 'yellow' challenge at icon-crack so I left the coloring til last because I wanted to put it off as long as possible. Give me a color scheme and inevitably, I will try and do anything but that color scheme. Anyway, in order to achieve the yellow coloring in question I stamped onto a new layer, and then I opened Variations. Variations can be clunky, yes, and it does add color overall so if you are looking for something subtle, this might not be your tool. However, I was, in fact, looking to beat my icon over the head with yellow so variations is perfect. Basically, I just clicked on 'more yellow' until I was happy. Awesome.
4. At this point, the icon is okay, but I felt it was a little boring so I wanted to add some more grunge. I took a texture from the large texture set here and set it to Screen. It probably needed resizing and moving around a bit to get what I wanted, but that's pretty much it.
5. STAMP THEM LAYERS AND SHARPEN. WOOO! I use Paint Daubs to sharpen which is awesome because, hey, tinebrella taught me you could do that. FUNNY HOW SHE IS EVERYWHERE IN THIS TUTORIAL. If you want to learn how sharpening this way works, I would check out anything Val has ever done, but most importantly, the sharpening workshop she did at icons-concrit!
6. Last step! Okay, here's the thing about me and lines. Lines beg me to add text! I don't know why. Anyway, I am fairly certain the line of text I used was from a song by Train as I was most likely listening to them during the making of this icon. My current playlist is just...Train, Ricki-Lee, and Roxette. Because of reasons. Anyway, the font here is Grant's Ghosts which is probably available from Da Font. Anyway, I really like it so it has appeared on several of my icons lately. In case you are having trouble reading it for whatever reason, it says 'we were made for this'. THIS FITS DEAN AND CASTIEL. IT ISN'T JUST RANDOM, I SWEAR. Anyway, I placed the text along the line, obviously, and then I selected the color using the eye dropper tool.
And that's a wrap! Hope you had fun!
1. Yes, I've made this into a tutorial so, technically, re-making this icon exactly is fair game, but, as the maker, I would just rather you not. Make your own thing. It'll be cooler anyway!
2. Questions and additional tips and tricks are totally welcome. Hit up the comment section!
3. Requests for other guides/tutorials are welcome with the provision that I may not have time or the .psd saved to make your tutorial. Or I might only have half a .psd. I don't know. I'm weird.
4. Linking to this tutorial is a-okay. Especially if it is a tutorial rec list, and if it is, TELL ME ABOUT IT BECAUSE I LOVE TUTORIAL REC LISTS LIKE KIDS LOVE CANDY.
5. You can find the icon in question in this post, and you can find my other tutorials under the tutorial tag.