I have been inspired by
icon_tutorial and all the wonderful tutorials there to make a tutorial. It's nothing overly exciting, but I think I made a pretty nice icon. This tutorial was made with Paint Shop Pro 7, and assumes some amount of familiarity with the program. It probably ports over to other programs well, as long as they have layers and some way to play with opacity settings and etc.
I created this icon:
Feel free to use it, following my standard rules(see my user info if you've forgotten or just don't know).
If you like this tutorial, please comment. I'd love to see what you make from it if you make anything!
First, find a picture you want to make into an icon. I chose
Crop it down to 100x100 and sharpen if you'd like. I sharpened the image once, it may take more times, just play with it.
Chose a portion of the original image and rotate it a little using the transformation tool or the 'rotate' feature.
Paste that selection to it's own layer on the icon image. For now leave the layer mode at 'Normal'. Select the part of the image you want gone and then go to Selection/Modify->Feather. I feathered the selection 15 pixels.
Hit delete until you're happy with how it looks.
Adjust the opacity of the new layer.
Take the eraser tool and set it to a largish size, maybe an opacity of 38, and a hardness of less than 50. Erase more of the larger image until you're satisified with how much of the base image is showing. Maybe fiddle with the opacity of the layer here if you're not happy.
Create a new Normal layer for your border. I chose to use this border brush by
dorky_duck with the airbrush tool at 100 opacity, size 100, white, clicked a couple times, and mirrored it, but you can use whatever you'd like.
Then, because I wasn't happy with how opaque part of the border was and I didn't want to up the opacity of the rest of the it, I selected the parts I wanted to be 100% white, feathered the selection 2 pixels, and filled it with white.
On a new layer, using the font 'Bell MT' (or a similar 'plain' font) at size 8, with antialias checked, chose a very dark grey(almost black) and write the first half of some line at the top of the white space. Then chose a slightly lighter shade and write the second half. I poisitioned it slightly off of the icon, 'cause I think it looks neat.
Yet another new layer. This time chose a somewhat fancier but still legible font. I chose Chaucer, bold, at size 20. Use a grey color, and chose a sort of 'attention' or 'focus' word. I just used the beginning of the lyric I wanted. Make the font large enough to cover the other lines and a bit of the picture, and make sure it's a selection.
Without deselecting your font, change the active layer to your base image. Go to Colors/Adjust->Brightness/Contrast. Set the Contrast to 0 and the Brightness to something fairly bright, but not totally white. This is so later the new 'focus word' will show.
Return back to your newest font layer and deselect the font. Change the layer mode to Multiply and the opacity to something around 60. I also went back and played with the opacity of the layer with the longer lyric lines on it.
Okay, this could actually be finished, but I'm not feeling it yet. So, create another new layer, and stick a gradient in it. I used this one, which I made just now( feel free to use it, and credit creativekim ). Set the layer mode to Screen and play with the opacity.
Finally, take your eraser tool on the same settings as before and sort of clear up a bit of your icon's focal point from the gradient. Save, and viola! Icon!
I also made another icon,though not with this method, but here it is.