83. A Guide to Negative Space + Two Tutorials
the_silverdoe asked something on how I do negative space/backgrounds, so here's a general guide, a general tutorial, and a more specific tutorial :) My tutorials are intended to demonstrate my icon-making process, and hopefully to help other icon makers - they are not here so anyone can copy my work, so please don't!
Why go for negative space instead of another crop/technique?
I have to be honest, the vast majority of my negative space icons come from me being too lazy to try anything else, and it tends to happen when the icon lends itself to a centre crop (and by lends itself, I again mean I’m too lazy to try anything more adventurous with the cap...) Sometimes there is actually thought behind deciding to go negative space though, for instance with these:
1. the theme was 'solitude' so I wanted to emphasise her complete isolation by using negative space
2. & 3. erasing most of the background in order to draw attention to some background detail (the decoration on the wall and the frame, and the picture on the wall)
4. existing background made the icon confusing, wanted to make Lucas more prominent
How do you decide what to do with the background?
Again, generally stemming from personal laziness (wow I’m coming off well here…) I’ll normally stick with a block colour/gradient for the background, which usually comes from the colours in the cap itself:
these were all inspired by the colour of the characters’ costumes
and actually so is this one - I loved how well Gwen and Vivien’s dresses in the original cap went together colour-wise, so I decided to use the colour of Vivien’s dress to go with the background of Gwen
I was more creative with some of them though:
1. purple is historically the colour of nobility/aristocracy, and this is quite a defining moment in their reign
2. for some reason I had this idea of a Harry Potter/Merlin crossover, so Hogwarts seemed a logical background
3. the icon looked a bit bare with just a gradient background, but I really like icons where the background texture leaks into the foreground subject so I thought I’d give it a go
4. loved the decoration on the wall and wanted to emphasise it
5. there’s quite a bit going on in this cap as it is, so I just neatened up the wall colour to make the picture and the sofa and characters stand out a bit more
6. saw this texture by softstarlessand loved it, remembered it while trying to be more creative than just plain block colour/gradient
7. loved the turquoise and gold combination of her dress, but there was enough ‘gold’ in the cap (her skin and hair) that I wanted to emphasise the turquoise more
8. wanted to bring out her hair colour, and that (for once :P) she’s actually happy, and yellow is the colour of joy
9. emphasis on Lucas, not the background, so just a plain block colour taken from his skin tone once I’d monotone-coloured the cap
10. loved the simple purity of all the white, wanted to keep to that theme. Also, there’s enough detail in her dress that the background doesn’t need any
How do you actually cut them out?
I find that cutting out an image already resized to 100px can make it quite a sharp cut and quite pixellated, so I tend to cut out on a larger canvas. However, because my resizing & sharpening methods generally include creating multiple layers from visible and/or duplicating layers several times, I don’t want to be resizing too much. If you create a new layer from visible then you automatically merge the subject with the background, which is a pain if you want to keep editing them separately; if you duplicate a cut-out layer then often you will lose the exact edges you made in the image. So, I normally crop&resize the screencap I want to cut out down to 175x175px (sharpening/blurring as necessary on the way), and then I cut it out there.
Decided the best way to explain this was with a demonstration, so here's an icon I made from scratch to show my usual method:
>>>
Take this cap for example. I like Daenerys’ position in relation to the width of the cap, so I’ll just make the canvas size square, then resize to 500x500px. (500px square is a good size to start off with, because it usually doesn’t require any sharpening/blurring):
http://i.imgur.com/XmGIRMc.png
(Now if I were being my normal lazy self, I’d just fill in the blank space at the top using the colour cropped from the top bit of the existing sky, maybe use a couple of textures to add a bit of light, then resize and colour to get a very boring icon, but because I’m supposed to be cutting Daenerys out of the background, I won’t do that :P)
So, now we resize to 175x175px. I just duplicate the layer, blur it a couple of times (Filter > Blur > Blur), resize to 175, then adjust the opacity of the blurred layer until it looked decent. Depending on the image (and the image quality) I’ll sometimes resize from 500 to 300px first, get it decently sharpened, and then repeat the process from 300 to 175px. Anyway, here’s what we’ve got now:
Now we’ll adjust the curves and light/shadow, because it’s much easier to do before the image is cut out (because of the issue with duplicating layers I mentioned before). So, duplicate the layer, set to Screen at opacity 100, create a new layer from visible:
And here’s where we start actually cutting Daenerys out of the picture. To make it easier to see bit you’ve missed, I recommend making a block colour layer of a contrasting colour and putting it below what you’re trying to cut out. Easiest way to do this is to pick a colour from the icon using the Colour Dropper, create a new layer and fill it with that colour, then invert the colour you get. So I ended up with this lovely colour (once I upped the saturation a bit), which is quite a contrast to the blue of the screencap. Anyway, move that layer to just below what you’re cutting out.
Now use the Free Select (lasso) tool to get rid of the majority of the background that you don’t want:
Then use the eraser tool on a very small setting (I have it on the brush ‘2. Hardness 050’, size 8.24) and get rid of the rest of the background. Some people use layer masks to do this sort of thing, but they confuse the hell out of my so I just stick with the eraser. If you accidentally erase something you’re not supposed to, then Ctrl+click de-erases it. Lots of practise makes this easier!
Not the neatest in the world, but generally the background you use won’t be as much as a contrast from the image, so the messy bits won’t show so much.
This is where I resize to 100px, because a lot of textures are that size and making them fit a larger canvas just ends up making them blurry. So, duplicate the cut-out layer (see how the layer edges changed there? That’s why it’s often not worth trying to make them perfect until it’s at 100x100px) and go Filter > Blur > Selective Gaussian Blur (blur radius 5.00, max. delta 18, set this layer at Normal opacity something between 20 and 40 (I used 30.0 here)). Merge this layer down (do NOT create a new layer from visible or you will lose all your cutting-out hard work), then duplicate that layer (again see how the edges have changed). With the top layer go Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur (blur radius 2.5 both horizontal and vertical). Now resize the image to 100px. The subject is likely rather blurry still, so just adjust the opacity of the top layer until everything is nice and sharp again:
Now you can go about neatening up the edges if you like, although depending on what background you’re going to put in, sometimes it’s not worth it because the messy bits won’t show. I neatened them up a little bit, just because I don’t actually know what background I’ll be using yet:
As I said, I actually have no idea what to do with the background here (generally that helps! :P) so I’m going to grab a couple of random textures and hope for the best…
I re-coloured the terracotta layer to 309191 (literally just went Colour > Colourize and that colour came up and I liked it):
Then pasted this texture by ellaangeluson top of the teal, set to Screen at 100 opacity, then desaturated it a bit (Colour > Hue-Saturation, lowered the master Saturation to -50):
Wanted to make Daenerys blend into the background more, so duplicated that texture and brought it to the top, lowered opacity to 50.2, duplicated that layer and set to Soft Light (same opacity), desaturated the top layer completely and then inverted the colour <-- this is me just playing around
Obviously needs more contrast, so create a new layer from visible and adjust the curves like so to get this:
Still needs a bit more shadow so take this texture by innocent_lexys(or really any of her gradient textures - I use them basically all the time because they’re so helpful when trying to put some shadow into an icon), set to Soft Light at opacity 100, lower the saturation to -40:
Create a new layer from visible and adjust curves:
Her face looks a bit oversaturated, so duplicate the layer, erase all but her face, then lower the saturation a bit:
Sharpen it a bit (Filter > Enhance > Sharpen, I think I used the default setting three times), and then I’m going to call it a day :D
There we go! Could probably do with a bit more shadow, but that’s the basic gist of how I make 99% of my icons :P
I've also done a more specific tutorial for the following icon, because my process was a little different to normal:
>>>
I started with this cap, and because it reminded me of the painting/portrait style of rosedamask’s Downton Abbey icons (see here) I decided I wanted a rather flowery negative space background for this icon.
Here I wanted Marianne to be on the right hand side of the icon, and when I cropped the cap it wasn’t wide enough (460x500), so I increased the canvas size to 500px square, shifted Marianne to the right, and filled the blank space with black, just to get a square base:
this to this
In order to make the cutting out easier, I resized to 175x175px. 500px is fine but when you come to resize later I find that it’s tricky keeping the smooth edges of a cut-out image because I resize using duplicate layers and various blurs, and often the smoothness is lost if you have to resize a lot.
Normally (see above tutorial) I’d add a layer of a completely random contrasting colour below the image when I’m cutting out stuff (and then only add the background texture(s) after that’s done) because it makes it easier to see where bits have been missed out/accidentally erased, but because of the shadows of this image (specifically on her right arm) I wanted to make sure she blended into the background texture, so I used the texture from the start.
So, in a new canvas, paste this texture (don’t know who it’s by, but I think I found it on Google Images) and resize to the same size as the Marianne image.
Wanted to add a bit of light/shadow to the base texture, so take this texture by innocent_lexys, desaturate and set to Soft Light, opacity at 100:
(Tutorial images from here on will be a little oversharpened because they’re 100x100px, but at this point I was still on 175. Also, ignore the weird lines at the top and left, it’s only because of the odd resizing).
Now paste the Marianne image as a new layer, and cut out the black background. My usual method is to take the Free Select Tool (the lasso one) to get rid of the majority of the background, and then just go around the bits close to where you want to keep with a very small eraser brush (about 8pt big):
Set this layer to Soft Light opacity 100, duplicate and set to Screen opacity 100, then duplicate again and set to Normal opacity 67.8:
(this just helps it to blend with the background a bit better)
Take the desaturated innocent_lexys texture, duplicate and bring to top, set to Screen at opacity 60.4. Then create a new layer from visible:
Now we resize to 100x100. Duplicate the visible layer, then go to Filters > Blur > Selective Gaussian Blur, Blur Radius at 5.00, Max. delta at 18. Set this layer to Normal at opacity 34.1 (that’s not specific, just happens to be the setting I ended up using after playing around a bit). Then create a new layer from visible, go to Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set the Blur Radius to 2.5 (Horizontal and Vertical), set this layer to Normal at opacity 33.3, then resize the whole image to 100x100px:
(that whole load of waffle is basically me approximating Topaz in Gimp)
Now adjust the curves slightly to bring a bit more light/shadow to the icon. I don’t have the exact settings saved, but it probably looked something like this. So, this is what the icon looks like now:
The icon was looking a bit too yellow, so I duplicated what was visible and adjusted the Hue of the image (Colour > Hue-Saturation, Hue at something like -15), then set this layer to Soft Light at opacity 42.7:
Her face still looked a little yellow, so duplicate the layer, erase everything but her skin, and then adjust the hue of that so it’s a bit more pink:
Wanted a bit more blue in the background, so again duplicate the visible layer, erase all but the background, then use the hue slider in Hue-Saturation to make it a bit more blue:
Create one last new layer from visible, adjust the curves marginally, and that’s it!
Ask The Maker 5.0 || My Thread
Why go for negative space instead of another crop/technique?
I have to be honest, the vast majority of my negative space icons come from me being too lazy to try anything else, and it tends to happen when the icon lends itself to a centre crop (and by lends itself, I again mean I’m too lazy to try anything more adventurous with the cap...) Sometimes there is actually thought behind deciding to go negative space though, for instance with these:
1. the theme was 'solitude' so I wanted to emphasise her complete isolation by using negative space
2. & 3. erasing most of the background in order to draw attention to some background detail (the decoration on the wall and the frame, and the picture on the wall)
4. existing background made the icon confusing, wanted to make Lucas more prominent
How do you decide what to do with the background?
Again, generally stemming from personal laziness (wow I’m coming off well here…) I’ll normally stick with a block colour/gradient for the background, which usually comes from the colours in the cap itself:
these were all inspired by the colour of the characters’ costumes
and actually so is this one - I loved how well Gwen and Vivien’s dresses in the original cap went together colour-wise, so I decided to use the colour of Vivien’s dress to go with the background of Gwen
I was more creative with some of them though:
1. purple is historically the colour of nobility/aristocracy, and this is quite a defining moment in their reign
2. for some reason I had this idea of a Harry Potter/Merlin crossover, so Hogwarts seemed a logical background
3. the icon looked a bit bare with just a gradient background, but I really like icons where the background texture leaks into the foreground subject so I thought I’d give it a go
4. loved the decoration on the wall and wanted to emphasise it
5. there’s quite a bit going on in this cap as it is, so I just neatened up the wall colour to make the picture and the sofa and characters stand out a bit more
6. saw this texture by softstarlessand loved it, remembered it while trying to be more creative than just plain block colour/gradient
7. loved the turquoise and gold combination of her dress, but there was enough ‘gold’ in the cap (her skin and hair) that I wanted to emphasise the turquoise more
8. wanted to bring out her hair colour, and that (for once :P) she’s actually happy, and yellow is the colour of joy
9. emphasis on Lucas, not the background, so just a plain block colour taken from his skin tone once I’d monotone-coloured the cap
10. loved the simple purity of all the white, wanted to keep to that theme. Also, there’s enough detail in her dress that the background doesn’t need any
How do you actually cut them out?
I find that cutting out an image already resized to 100px can make it quite a sharp cut and quite pixellated, so I tend to cut out on a larger canvas. However, because my resizing & sharpening methods generally include creating multiple layers from visible and/or duplicating layers several times, I don’t want to be resizing too much. If you create a new layer from visible then you automatically merge the subject with the background, which is a pain if you want to keep editing them separately; if you duplicate a cut-out layer then often you will lose the exact edges you made in the image. So, I normally crop&resize the screencap I want to cut out down to 175x175px (sharpening/blurring as necessary on the way), and then I cut it out there.
Decided the best way to explain this was with a demonstration, so here's an icon I made from scratch to show my usual method:
>>>
Take this cap for example. I like Daenerys’ position in relation to the width of the cap, so I’ll just make the canvas size square, then resize to 500x500px. (500px square is a good size to start off with, because it usually doesn’t require any sharpening/blurring):
http://i.imgur.com/XmGIRMc.png
(Now if I were being my normal lazy self, I’d just fill in the blank space at the top using the colour cropped from the top bit of the existing sky, maybe use a couple of textures to add a bit of light, then resize and colour to get a very boring icon, but because I’m supposed to be cutting Daenerys out of the background, I won’t do that :P)
So, now we resize to 175x175px. I just duplicate the layer, blur it a couple of times (Filter > Blur > Blur), resize to 175, then adjust the opacity of the blurred layer until it looked decent. Depending on the image (and the image quality) I’ll sometimes resize from 500 to 300px first, get it decently sharpened, and then repeat the process from 300 to 175px. Anyway, here’s what we’ve got now:
Now we’ll adjust the curves and light/shadow, because it’s much easier to do before the image is cut out (because of the issue with duplicating layers I mentioned before). So, duplicate the layer, set to Screen at opacity 100, create a new layer from visible:
And here’s where we start actually cutting Daenerys out of the picture. To make it easier to see bit you’ve missed, I recommend making a block colour layer of a contrasting colour and putting it below what you’re trying to cut out. Easiest way to do this is to pick a colour from the icon using the Colour Dropper, create a new layer and fill it with that colour, then invert the colour you get. So I ended up with this lovely colour (once I upped the saturation a bit), which is quite a contrast to the blue of the screencap. Anyway, move that layer to just below what you’re cutting out.
Now use the Free Select (lasso) tool to get rid of the majority of the background that you don’t want:
Then use the eraser tool on a very small setting (I have it on the brush ‘2. Hardness 050’, size 8.24) and get rid of the rest of the background. Some people use layer masks to do this sort of thing, but they confuse the hell out of my so I just stick with the eraser. If you accidentally erase something you’re not supposed to, then Ctrl+click de-erases it. Lots of practise makes this easier!
Not the neatest in the world, but generally the background you use won’t be as much as a contrast from the image, so the messy bits won’t show so much.
This is where I resize to 100px, because a lot of textures are that size and making them fit a larger canvas just ends up making them blurry. So, duplicate the cut-out layer (see how the layer edges changed there? That’s why it’s often not worth trying to make them perfect until it’s at 100x100px) and go Filter > Blur > Selective Gaussian Blur (blur radius 5.00, max. delta 18, set this layer at Normal opacity something between 20 and 40 (I used 30.0 here)). Merge this layer down (do NOT create a new layer from visible or you will lose all your cutting-out hard work), then duplicate that layer (again see how the edges have changed). With the top layer go Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur (blur radius 2.5 both horizontal and vertical). Now resize the image to 100px. The subject is likely rather blurry still, so just adjust the opacity of the top layer until everything is nice and sharp again:
Now you can go about neatening up the edges if you like, although depending on what background you’re going to put in, sometimes it’s not worth it because the messy bits won’t show. I neatened them up a little bit, just because I don’t actually know what background I’ll be using yet:
As I said, I actually have no idea what to do with the background here (generally that helps! :P) so I’m going to grab a couple of random textures and hope for the best…
I re-coloured the terracotta layer to 309191 (literally just went Colour > Colourize and that colour came up and I liked it):
Then pasted this texture by ellaangeluson top of the teal, set to Screen at 100 opacity, then desaturated it a bit (Colour > Hue-Saturation, lowered the master Saturation to -50):
Wanted to make Daenerys blend into the background more, so duplicated that texture and brought it to the top, lowered opacity to 50.2, duplicated that layer and set to Soft Light (same opacity), desaturated the top layer completely and then inverted the colour <-- this is me just playing around
Obviously needs more contrast, so create a new layer from visible and adjust the curves like so to get this:
Still needs a bit more shadow so take this texture by innocent_lexys(or really any of her gradient textures - I use them basically all the time because they’re so helpful when trying to put some shadow into an icon), set to Soft Light at opacity 100, lower the saturation to -40:
Create a new layer from visible and adjust curves:
Her face looks a bit oversaturated, so duplicate the layer, erase all but her face, then lower the saturation a bit:
Sharpen it a bit (Filter > Enhance > Sharpen, I think I used the default setting three times), and then I’m going to call it a day :D
There we go! Could probably do with a bit more shadow, but that’s the basic gist of how I make 99% of my icons :P
I've also done a more specific tutorial for the following icon, because my process was a little different to normal:
>>>
I started with this cap, and because it reminded me of the painting/portrait style of rosedamask’s Downton Abbey icons (see here) I decided I wanted a rather flowery negative space background for this icon.
Here I wanted Marianne to be on the right hand side of the icon, and when I cropped the cap it wasn’t wide enough (460x500), so I increased the canvas size to 500px square, shifted Marianne to the right, and filled the blank space with black, just to get a square base:
this to this
In order to make the cutting out easier, I resized to 175x175px. 500px is fine but when you come to resize later I find that it’s tricky keeping the smooth edges of a cut-out image because I resize using duplicate layers and various blurs, and often the smoothness is lost if you have to resize a lot.
Normally (see above tutorial) I’d add a layer of a completely random contrasting colour below the image when I’m cutting out stuff (and then only add the background texture(s) after that’s done) because it makes it easier to see where bits have been missed out/accidentally erased, but because of the shadows of this image (specifically on her right arm) I wanted to make sure she blended into the background texture, so I used the texture from the start.
So, in a new canvas, paste this texture (don’t know who it’s by, but I think I found it on Google Images) and resize to the same size as the Marianne image.
Wanted to add a bit of light/shadow to the base texture, so take this texture by innocent_lexys, desaturate and set to Soft Light, opacity at 100:
(Tutorial images from here on will be a little oversharpened because they’re 100x100px, but at this point I was still on 175. Also, ignore the weird lines at the top and left, it’s only because of the odd resizing).
Now paste the Marianne image as a new layer, and cut out the black background. My usual method is to take the Free Select Tool (the lasso one) to get rid of the majority of the background, and then just go around the bits close to where you want to keep with a very small eraser brush (about 8pt big):
Set this layer to Soft Light opacity 100, duplicate and set to Screen opacity 100, then duplicate again and set to Normal opacity 67.8:
(this just helps it to blend with the background a bit better)
Take the desaturated innocent_lexys texture, duplicate and bring to top, set to Screen at opacity 60.4. Then create a new layer from visible:
Now we resize to 100x100. Duplicate the visible layer, then go to Filters > Blur > Selective Gaussian Blur, Blur Radius at 5.00, Max. delta at 18. Set this layer to Normal at opacity 34.1 (that’s not specific, just happens to be the setting I ended up using after playing around a bit). Then create a new layer from visible, go to Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set the Blur Radius to 2.5 (Horizontal and Vertical), set this layer to Normal at opacity 33.3, then resize the whole image to 100x100px:
(that whole load of waffle is basically me approximating Topaz in Gimp)
Now adjust the curves slightly to bring a bit more light/shadow to the icon. I don’t have the exact settings saved, but it probably looked something like this. So, this is what the icon looks like now:
The icon was looking a bit too yellow, so I duplicated what was visible and adjusted the Hue of the image (Colour > Hue-Saturation, Hue at something like -15), then set this layer to Soft Light at opacity 42.7:
Her face still looked a little yellow, so duplicate the layer, erase everything but her skin, and then adjust the hue of that so it’s a bit more pink:
Wanted a bit more blue in the background, so again duplicate the visible layer, erase all but the background, then use the hue slider in Hue-Saturation to make it a bit more blue:
Create one last new layer from visible, adjust the curves marginally, and that’s it!
Ask The Maker 5.0 || My Thread