Ask the maker 3.0!

[aida_rose]

It's time for our third round of Ask the Maker!

Here you'll get the chance to ask icon makers who sign up, questions about their icons and other graphics. You can ask for tutorials, guides/"How to", or ask any other questions regarding their work so the makers can compile a Q&A post with the answers to all the questions they get. As always, .PSD

Comments

[applepips16]

The silhoutte thing is kind of awesome. Can I request a tutorial on this icon? Or maybe like silhouttes/blending in general? :)

[angelamaria]

Hi! Thanks for asking :D That icon was actually super simple to make, it feels a bit silly going through it XD as there is very little wizardry involved!

I use Lighten a lot when I do silhouettes, whether it is to have the underlying image show through or to knock out colors in the topmost image, like in the icon below (the lower portion):



Basically just finding out what dark color will knock out as much of the image without losing the definition. I will sometimes use masks to further define an area, but as long as the top image/outline isn't very light, Lighten does a good bit of the work already.

As for the icon itself--the base images were very good, and because of the graphic novel style there was enough strong shadows to go with on the original image that I didn't do a whole lot to achieve the effect I wanted!



I started with the first image, pasting the image on a 100x100 canvas and resized/moved it around until I had a good crop. Initially I wanted both guns to be in the icon, but I thought it looked a bit funny out of context. I dropped the saturation using Curves, though I tried replicating just now using a Vibrance layer and it looks identical at 0, -34. Also ran the Sharpen filter on this layer.



(I usually like lowering the saturation on images a bit, so that step is probably not needed lol.)

I set the layer to Lighten, and added the second image underneath. I moved it around some--I wanted the man in the second image (it's actually the same character) to be seen, of course, but did not want to eagle there as it is distracting. I know I fiddled with color balance a bit, but it was right on the layer and I'm not sure what my settings were anymore. D: I ended up with this:



(added border to show the empty space)

A quick duplicate of the same layer, set to Soft Light, to give it a more glowy look. Then, since I have a blank area on the right, I duplicated the layers, flipped them horizontally to mirror, and moved them to the side.

And that's it!



I'm so sorry if this ended up being entirely too simple /facepalm

[applepips16]

No no, it's perfect! I kind of have a love hate relationship with silhouettes and blending. Sometimes it works out fine, sometimes, not at all. Sigh. But thanks for explaining this to me so neatly. I never thought of colouring one cap under another. What I usually do is colour them both separately and then somehow try to fix them together. It's usually hit and miss then. I shall go try this out now. :D

[angelamaria]

I'm glad it's helpful! :D

Yeah, for me I always work within that canvas. A lot of times, after putting down a couple of textures or light blobs and other nice things, the image just looks "off", colour or saturation or whatever, so I usually end up adding layers in between the top and the base image to correct things--or altogether change color balance, that sort of thing. It's not unusual for me to have layers numbered out of order XD (like that particular icon)