The Princess Zelda Icon Tutorial
The Princess Zelda Icon Tutorial: using Adobe Photoshop 7.0 (easily translatable)
This works well with all kinds of images!
1. Ready your image. This means cropping, sharpening, whatever you need to do to get your base ready.
2. Take this texture and set it to layer setting "multiply" at 100%.
(unknown maker)
3. Set this to "darken" at 100%.
(unknown maker)
4. Set this to "saturation" at 100%.
(unknown maker)
We've got a pretty dawn/dusk coloring thing going on, don't we? You can stop here, go off on your own iconing adventure, or follow me to the next step.
5. Take various light blob textures, preferrably blue ones. If you don't have any blue, that's alright. You can either see how you do with your colored ones or change the hues to a nice sky blue. Set each of them to "lighten" in the top left corner of the icon with opacities varying between 30% and 70%, depending on the texture itself. We want subtle.
6. Now, you can add any brushes or text you want. Like in step five, subtle is probably best. I used a white brush around the edges and set it to "soft light" at 100%.
And sweet! We're done.
Other icons made using this method:
