An amazingly long resource post by someone just starting making icons
ETA 2 Aug 2010: If you would like to more easily see the structure of this post (by which I mean: having the cuts not expanded), then [view this post with all the cuts in place (on DW)] or [view this post with all the cuts in place (on LJ)]. End ETA.
Okay, icons! Evidently I am making some? This confuses me-- it's not really something I ever expected to be doing, at least not beyond the basic crop&shrink, but it's kind of fun so far. And I can see how it could easily become addictive (luckily going down that road would take dedication and focus and not getting distracted by other shiny ideas. And I'm certain to fail on at least one of those points, so hopefully I won't get eaten by the icon-making monster). But since I never really expected or intended to make icons, I haven't really been paying any attention to icon tutorials or resources [or even conventions of the community (beyond the basic 'give credit' and 'verify that it is permissible before modifying an icon someone else made'), so I'm kind of scrambling to play catch-up on that front-- although I'll say that compiling this list was a minor crash-course]. Aaaand of course I went and started working on icons when I didn't really have a good connection so I wasn't really on the internet for fun, which means no instructions or tutorials. And I'm not terribly savvy at image manip programs to begin with, either. *shakes head at self* Eh, leaping in with both feet and trying to wing it and/or figure out what I need on the go is pretty par for the course for me learning new crafts, so at least I'm used to it?.
So this post is a way for me to collect all that info which I should have methodically gathered and looked through (or at least skimmed before setting parts of it aside for later) before beginning to iconify (which is totally a word because I used it in a sentence, *phthbit* says I to the scolding voice in my head which sounds like one of my more dour English teachers in school).
I've gathered this by going to the icon-makers (icon-artists? what's the accepted term?) listed in my profile and checking what resources and tutorials they have listed. This is clearly not an exhaustive list nor does it reflect what I've found useful to me since I haven't actually read any of them yet. The first is probably, strictly speaking, impossible to achieve (which is no reason not to attempt it) and the latter may or may not happen at some point.
I started making this for my own use and then I decided that as long as I was spontaneously organising things I might as well post it publicly. Which sadly meant that I had to go back and make sure I was using complete sentences and providing some actual context and perhaps just a bit of coherency. It's probably still a fairly idiosyncratic compilation. If you have other links you think I ought to add, drop me a line and let me know! :)
And now (finally!) onto the links portion of the evening:
Icon-making resources and tutorials from iconers
(These may or may not also include general image-manip stuff too.) Arranged by iconer, in some vague fashion. Annotated according to my whim.
maharet83 // maharet83 who does
forsquares // forsquares:
tv-boyfriends:
icons-of-isis which is the icon journal of
mysticalchild_isis // isiscaughey:
curtana who does iconsbycurtana:
autumn-lilacs:
hermitsoul // hermitsoul who does
hermit_icons:
girlyb_icons which is the icon comm of girlboheme:
girl-in-oslo:
More tutorials
Specifically, those by people whom I didn't find via the icons I have currently uploaded. (yes, this is quite possibly an arbitrary designation, but it sort of makes sense at the moment, so eh, might as well.)
[The tutorial tag at seeingyouaround] and [ The tutorials at seeingyouaround organised by displaying the icon which they produce]. Graphics tutorials, evidently. *shrugs* somehow this ended up open in one of my tabs? seeingyouaround appears to be a (possibly inactive) graphics comm, so it's probably relevant to my interests in some fashion.
[ 155 tutorials listed by tessykins (tutorials by various people).] This is really neat because rather than being a text list of links, it's a table of images which are themselves the result of their respective linked tutorial.
[ Tessykins' icon resource page.] Put here because it looked all lonely down in the 'other resources' section.
Comms
(aka: dude, I probably should have at least known that these existed before I started iconning?iconing?iconifying! [I knew there was a reason I made up that word!]. Anyway, I probably ought to have known of the existence of these comms prior to beginning to iconify. By the way, we're currently taking bets on if I'll actually poke through them at all before I upload my first icon set (the odds are against me, btw *g*).
good-tutorial:
icon_tutorial:
gimp_gate:
pixelhunters:
Icon_Extras:
icontutorial
who_gets_credit:
lets-find-it:
icon_talk:
graphicsluts:
Other resources
angelamaria's [Icon Table Generator] @ [Bauble]
[icon table generator at roseclear.net]
[html color codes (useful for use with the icon table generator at roseclear.net)]
Screencaps
A bunch (all?) of the iconifiers listed above include info on where they got their screencaps. Mostly I don't really have a clue (neophyte much, yeah?) other than hanging around dj-capslock and telling myself that I can't iconify all the shows. I swear I've run into non-LJ/DW cap repositories but I'm not sure where I ended up putting those bookmarks so I'll have to find my way back to them via internet Brownian motion or something.
I suppose this section is mostly a placeholder so that I remember add stuff as I run across it.
Oh, wait! Some stuff:
[cybel's screencaps tag.]
cybel caps Leverage and SPN and maybe others that don't show up on the first page of the tag...
[caps by oxoniensis].
oxoniensis // oxoniensis has capped the following canons: Entourage, Friday Night Lights, Generation Kill, Northern Exposure, Miscellaneous [Memphis Belle (1990); Wilby Wonderful; Sigur Ros - Virar Vel Til Loftrsa], Psych, Smallville, Sports Night, Stargate Atlantis, Supernatural, Torchwood, The West Wing, Young Americans. [as of 10 July 2010]
Image manipulation programs
These are all freely available and play nicely on Linux. Maybe for my next impulsive epic reference post I'll annotate this section with good tutorials/overviews/etc for the novice user but at the moment I'll just link to the official sites and call it good.
Things that I use (for a very loose definition of 'use'):
Okay, time for food I think. And maybe later I'll actually leave all ten thousand of those links a comment saying 'I have linked this at this post at my journal' but right now it's nommy food time! Nom! Done!
Originally posted on 10 July 2010
Last edited on 2 Aug 2010: Added the links to view the post with cut tags cutting stuff! (Soooo much more useful, really!)
This entry was originally posted at http://fish-echo.dreamwidth.org/59066.html.
Okay, icons! Evidently I am making some? This confuses me-- it's not really something I ever expected to be doing, at least not beyond the basic crop&shrink, but it's kind of fun so far. And I can see how it could easily become addictive (luckily going down that road would take dedication and focus and not getting distracted by other shiny ideas. And I'm certain to fail on at least one of those points, so hopefully I won't get eaten by the icon-making monster). But since I never really expected or intended to make icons, I haven't really been paying any attention to icon tutorials or resources [or even conventions of the community (beyond the basic 'give credit' and 'verify that it is permissible before modifying an icon someone else made'), so I'm kind of scrambling to play catch-up on that front-- although I'll say that compiling this list was a minor crash-course]. Aaaand of course I went and started working on icons when I didn't really have a good connection so I wasn't really on the internet for fun, which means no instructions or tutorials. And I'm not terribly savvy at image manip programs to begin with, either. *shakes head at self* Eh, leaping in with both feet and trying to wing it and/or figure out what I need on the go is pretty par for the course for me learning new crafts, so at least I'm used to it?.
So this post is a way for me to collect all that info which I should have methodically gathered and looked through (or at least skimmed before setting parts of it aside for later) before beginning to iconify (which is totally a word because I used it in a sentence, *phthbit* says I to the scolding voice in my head which sounds like one of my more dour English teachers in school).
I've gathered this by going to the icon-makers (icon-artists? what's the accepted term?) listed in my profile and checking what resources and tutorials they have listed. This is clearly not an exhaustive list nor does it reflect what I've found useful to me since I haven't actually read any of them yet. The first is probably, strictly speaking, impossible to achieve (which is no reason not to attempt it) and the latter may or may not happen at some point.
I started making this for my own use and then I decided that as long as I was spontaneously organising things I might as well post it publicly. Which sadly meant that I had to go back and make sure I was using complete sentences and providing some actual context and perhaps just a bit of coherency. It's probably still a fairly idiosyncratic compilation. If you have other links you think I ought to add, drop me a line and let me know! :)
And now (finally!) onto the links portion of the evening:
Icon-making resources and tutorials from iconers
(These may or may not also include general image-manip stuff too.) Arranged by iconer, in some vague fashion. Annotated according to my whim.
maharet83 // maharet83 who does
forsquares // forsquares:
- [ maharet83's resource post.] Has a metric fucktonne of brushes and textures; lists a handful of cites under each of screencaps and fonts.
- [the 'tutorial' tag at forsquares (at DW)] (nb: there's no similar tag at the lj comm).
- [maharet83's LJ memory (main page listing all memory keywords)]-- icon tutorials are listed under a few memories (some of which are listed below. I don't know how much overlap there is among the various memory keywords.).
- [maharet83's LJ memory, keyword: 'tutorial']-- has a variety of icon tutorials listed.
- [maharet83's LJ memory, keyword: 'tutorial big']-- a handful or so more tutorials, presumably big ones :P
- [maharet83's LJ memory, keyword: 'tutorial brill']-- I'm going to guess that the tin doesn't lie...
- [maharet83's LJ memory, keyword: 'tutorial text']-- why am I even typing these out any more?
tv-boyfriends:
- [The 'tutorial' tag at tv_boyfriends.] Has a handful or so of tutorials.
- [ tv_boyfriends' picture organizer.] "Blank Icons are free to use as bases. Any icons can be used in part or whole. If you want a base to another icon, feel free to ask. I will plop any text you want if you do not have the resources to do so yourself. I also take requests from anyone. "
- [tv_boyfriends' profile page] Has a list of resources (double-handful each of 'Brushes & Textures' and 'Images and Screencaps').
- [ Many many icon bases from the 1970's Wonder Woman TV series.] Ahahahhaaaaa, yes! I hadn't realised how much I needed these in my life until I saw them (well, to be fair I've been contemplating getting caps of the old cartoon for a week or so.) I totally need to do stuff with these in my infinite free time.
icons-of-isis which is the icon journal of
mysticalchild_isis // isiscaughey:
- [ Isiscaughey's resource post.] Has a good number of brush/texture/gradient credits and maybe a short fuckton of citations for screencaps and image sources.
- [ Icons_of_isis's tutorial tag.] Blah, blah, blah, I'm getting bored with the links that are self-explanatory.
- [ Icons_of_isis's resources tag.] Includes original textures and the post with cites for resources used.
curtana who does iconsbycurtana:
- [ Iconsbycurtana's profile page.] Contains the listing of resources. Has cites for lots of textures, some brushes, some screencaps and images, a few gradients, a few fonts.
- [ Curtana's texture tag.] Bipity, bobity, boo! (Possibly I've finished becoming bored?)
- [ Curtana's tutorial tag.] It's tuts time, babe.
- [ Curtana's request post.] Can make requests for tutorials, woot.
autumn-lilacs:
- [ Autumn-Lilacs's icon resource page.] She lists a number of credits for brushes, textures and caps. And a few for fonts and other miscellaneous things.
hermitsoul // hermitsoul who does
hermit_icons:
- [ Hermitsoul's icon resources post.] Has a good number of citations under 'brushes/textures/gradients' and a handful under 'bases/images'.
girlyb_icons which is the icon comm of girlboheme:
- [ Girly B's resource post.] Has a metric fucktonne of credits under 'brushes, textures, patterns, gradients.' Also gives a handful-ish of credits under each of 'stills'; 'fonts'; 'quotes, lyrics'; 'stock: art, male models, general, ephemera, fabric'.
girl-in-oslo:
- [ Girl-in-Oslo's resource page]. Contains 'Brushes // Gradients // Patterns // Textures', gives maybe a score of cites total.
More tutorials
Specifically, those by people whom I didn't find via the icons I have currently uploaded. (yes, this is quite possibly an arbitrary designation, but it sort of makes sense at the moment, so eh, might as well.)
[The tutorial tag at seeingyouaround] and [ The tutorials at seeingyouaround organised by displaying the icon which they produce]. Graphics tutorials, evidently. *shrugs* somehow this ended up open in one of my tabs? seeingyouaround appears to be a (possibly inactive) graphics comm, so it's probably relevant to my interests in some fashion.
[ 155 tutorials listed by tessykins (tutorials by various people).] This is really neat because rather than being a text list of links, it's a table of images which are themselves the result of their respective linked tutorial.
[ Tessykins' icon resource page.] Put here because it looked all lonely down in the 'other resources' section.
Comms
(aka: dude, I probably should have at least known that these existed before I started iconning?iconing?iconifying! [I knew there was a reason I made up that word!]. Anyway, I probably ought to have known of the existence of these comms prior to beginning to iconify. By the way, we're currently taking bets on if I'll actually poke through them at all before I upload my first icon set (the odds are against me, btw *g*).
good-tutorial:
- Blurbs stolen from the profile: 'Graphic tutorials that explain WHAT, HOW and WHY.' // 'This community is for posting good, informative, in-depth graphic tutorials, nothing else. This community is here to teach people how to use graphic programs and their tools, and it's here to provide tutorials that both beginners and more experienced graphic makers can follow and learn from.'
- [The profile page of good_tutorial.] Has a bunch of detailed info with regards to the comm and is probably the best place to start poking around.
- [ Affiliates of good_tutorial.] A nice list of other LJ comms which are resource communities, tutorial communities or graphic communities. I haven't duplicated most of them in the 'comms' section-- the ones which I duplicated there are ones which seem likely to be highly useful to me now-ish (which is a fairly arbitrary and individual decision).
icon_tutorial:
- Blurbs stolen from the profile page: 'Graphic-making tips, tutorials, FAQ, Q&A, and resources.' // 'This community was founded by grass_stained with the intention of helping icon-makers of all skill levels, from total newbie to graphic design pro. Here, you can get your questions answered, post a tutorial for others to use, or find help in our extensive archive of tutorials and answers.' // 'Our cardinal rule is that all of your questions should be asking "How can I make...", not "Where can I find...?" ' Comment added by Fish: 'Seems to prompt extensive use of the word extensive.' (That I own a thesaurus you couldn't tell by this comm's entry, oops?).
- [ The FAQ post for icon_tutorial (LJ comm).] Seems to have an extensive array of newbie questions. The href'ed questions are at the beginning of the post and they reference the answers written in the latter part.
- [The profile for icon_tutorial (LJ comm).] Seems really extensive, haven't looked through.
- [The main page of the LJ memories of icon_tutorial.] Seems very extensive. Might be a better way to browse than the tags page? Or they might be identical?
- [Tag page for icon_tutorial (LJ comm).] But I like navigating by tags...
gimp_gate:
- Blurb: 'A community for GIMP & Inkscape users of all levels and experience.'
- [The 'Welcome to gimp_gate' post.] Gives a quick run-down on comm rules and guidelines.
- [The 'The idea behind gimp_gate' post] I think this translates to 'it seems like a good idea, no?' :)
- [gimp_gate's delicious account.] Haven't looked at yet (what? it was linked from the profile! C&p'ing doesn't require clicking :P .)
- [Tag page for gimp_gate.] I think I might be in love with the level of organisation here...
pixelhunters:
- Blurb: 'A community for collecting, showcasing, and searching for public domain and other remixable graphics'
- [Master resource list post.] Does what it says on the tin (not that I've done more than skim the headings). Need to look at sometime when I have actual brainpower and a few hours needing killing.
Icon_Extras:
- Blurbs stolen from the profile page: 'Icon_Extras is a community dedicated to helping icon and graphic makers (both new and old) by offering them a place to browse and share a variety of resources and tutorials, as well as being an outlet for help and discussions related to all aspects of icon and graphic making.
- [Tag page for icon_extras.] Yay, organisation! :)
icontutorial
- Blurbs stolen from the profile page: 'This is a community for sharing information about making icons. All members are welcomed and encouraged to post. Our goal is to help everyone learn more about techniques for making icons, whether that be light correction, application of brushes, fiddling with text, or any other graphical techniques.'
- Young comm, has a solid handful of tutorials already, seems to be not terribly active currently, doesn't seem to be affiliated with the LJ comm of a similar name.
who_gets_credit:
- Blurb: 'This is a resource community for finding the makers of icons, graphics, textures, brushes, layouts, anything you can think of!'
- [Profile page for who_gets_credit.] There's a smallish list of affiliated comms/journals at the end.
lets-find-it:
- Blurbs stolen from the profile page: 'Here you can ask: where can I find this texture, brush, picture, tutorial, who is this? ect.' // 'lets-find-it is a place for you to ask "where can I find" type of questions regarding graphic making, and graphic making ONLY! That means you can ask where to find the following: pictures, screen caps, textures, brushes, gradients, patterns, layouts, tutorials ect.'
- [ Affiliates of lets_find_it]. Restricted to resource and/or graphic communities. Has partial overlap with the affiliates of good-tutorial.
icon_talk:
- Blurb: 'A place where you can discuss icons and graphic making in a friendly environment.'
- [Profile page for icon_talk.] Yet another epic profile page with lots of information on it (this seems to be really common on these icon sites, to a much greater extent than I am used to. I wonder why that is.). Anyway, ought to actually read it at some point instead of just going 'wow, lots of words!' and c&p'ing the URL into a text document.
- Tagging appears to only have been done on mod posts? Drat. This makes it much less convenient to go trawling for discussions on community etiquette, bah.
- The comm main page (not the individual posts) is a really annoying light grey-on-dark grey, appending a '?style=mine' fixes that (but confuses me because then it looks like my journal! Um, silly fish-brained Fish...).
graphicsluts:
- Blurb stolen from the profile page: 'a fanart discussion community. methodology. strategies. processes. trends. everything and anything about fanart. open membership. closed posting.'
- Appears to be not currently active? Might still be a useful resource?
Other resources
angelamaria's [Icon Table Generator] @ [Bauble]
[icon table generator at roseclear.net]
[html color codes (useful for use with the icon table generator at roseclear.net)]
Screencaps
A bunch (all?) of the iconifiers listed above include info on where they got their screencaps. Mostly I don't really have a clue (neophyte much, yeah?) other than hanging around dj-capslock and telling myself that I can't iconify all the shows. I swear I've run into non-LJ/DW cap repositories but I'm not sure where I ended up putting those bookmarks so I'll have to find my way back to them via internet Brownian motion or something.
I suppose this section is mostly a placeholder so that I remember add stuff as I run across it.
Oh, wait! Some stuff:
[cybel's screencaps tag.]
cybel caps Leverage and SPN and maybe others that don't show up on the first page of the tag...
[caps by oxoniensis].
oxoniensis // oxoniensis has capped the following canons: Entourage, Friday Night Lights, Generation Kill, Northern Exposure, Miscellaneous [Memphis Belle (1990); Wilby Wonderful; Sigur Ros - Virar Vel Til Loftrsa], Psych, Smallville, Sports Night, Stargate Atlantis, Supernatural, Torchwood, The West Wing, Young Americans. [as of 10 July 2010]
Image manipulation programs
These are all freely available and play nicely on Linux. Maybe for my next impulsive epic reference post I'll annotate this section with good tutorials/overviews/etc for the novice user but at the moment I'll just link to the official sites and call it good.
Things that I use (for a very loose definition of 'use'):
- [The GIMP] An image manipulation program under the GNU license (hence the name; I think that this is one of those cases where it sounded cleverer at the time than it actually ended up being). Sometimes it drives me up the wall, sometimes it's really awesome. (Usually it starts being awesome at something about an hour or so after I break out the documentation... I deny that correlation equals causation.)
- [ImageMagick] Dude, this does command-line processing of image files! This means I can batch process stuff using bash! I am so fucking thrilled you have no idea! *filled with glee* *is a huge dork* what? I like to bash stuff from the command line... This seems like a fairly powerful suite, I definitely plan to actually read the documentation one of these days, really. I mean, at least all of the overview and quick guide, that can't be too hard, surely? (RTFM'ing is for people with attention spans. I'm a fish, I don't need no stinkin' attention span!)
- [Gwenview] This ended up on my computer during that fevered 'and now I shall download all the image programs ever, bwahaha, mine is an evil laugh' stage which hit just after I decided to actually do this graphics thing and just before I got bored and ended up reorganising part of my music library. But it seems kind of nifty as a command-center maybe? Dunno, still kind of poking at it and going 'erm, why'd I download you? And what is it exactly you'd say you do?'
Okay, time for food I think. And maybe later I'll actually leave all ten thousand of those links a comment saying 'I have linked this at this post at my journal' but right now it's nommy food time! Nom! Done!
Originally posted on 10 July 2010
Last edited on 2 Aug 2010: Added the links to view the post with cut tags cutting stuff! (Soooo much more useful, really!)
This entry was originally posted at http://fish-echo.dreamwidth.org/59066.html.