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

[wickedgrdn]

Username and where I post my work: wickedgrdn @ bel_perdente
What can we request from you (tutorials, Q&A, guides etc. .PSDs are not allowed: Whatever I'm asked, within reason. Icons from more than a year ago I probably won't remember what I did, lol, so probably best not to ask on old stuff.
Can we hotlink your icons?: I guess so.

[chosenfire28]

I really love your newest icon post, I've had it open on my computer since it went up (can't decide which ones i want lol) so I would love to see tutorials for:

[wickedgrdn]

Aww, thank you! :)

Yeah, I can do tuts for those, no probs! :P

[certainthings]

Fantastic choices, those are some of the icons I'd love to see tutorials for as well.

[wickedgrdn]

here's the tut for the first icon

[wickedgrdn]

tutorial for the mary icon

[wickedgrdn]

Ok, the Faith/Buffy icon? I'm having terrible trouble remembering what I all did to it. I know that I colored it in the following way

[kirtash_girl]

Do you have a tutorial for those Icons? (I love the composoition and the coloring and wonder how you achieve something like that)

[wickedgrdn]

The first 3 probably not. I don't save psd's for my icons and I'm having trouble remembering those first 3. :/ But the last two are pretty recent and I think I can do some basic tuts for each. :)

[kirtash_girl]

Well thats fantastic ;) Thanks!

[wickedgrdn]

Ok, I'm having difficulty remembering all the steps for the Dean/John icon, but I remember some basics of it:

I colored the images at full size and cut both of them out using the Pen Tool. I then pasted each image onto a texture by innocent_lexys (I think). I positioned both images to where I wanted them and then used a slight drop shadow on the image of John to make him stand out more against the image of Dean. I added the text 'this ends now' in Arial Black and the text 'i don't care what it takes' in Georgia (which is a direct quote from Salvation). I added some light blobs with a soft white brush at 60px with an opacity of 30% and a grungy grid texture. I copy-merged the whole icon, pasted and used high pass at 0.4 radius to sharpen everything. I set the layer to hard light at 10%.

Hope that helps!

I should have a tut up soon for the Buffy icon. Thank you!

[wickedgrdn]

here's the tut for the buffy icon

Hope it helps! Thanks for asking!

[certainthings]

Well, since someone's already asked for the tutorial(s) I'd like to see.

I shall ask you.

How do you know what's a good crop?

[wickedgrdn]

I really don't, tbqh. I just open up images, paste them into a 100x100 and play around. It's just pure dumb luck if I get a good crop out of it. Some icons (like my default for instance) I have a crop in mind when I open the image in Photoshop, but 99% of the time it's all on the fly. :)

Hope that helps and thanks for asking! :)

[longerthanwedo]

Could you explain your ~process on maintaining image quality in dark/closely cropped icons? AKA:

[wickedgrdn]

Of course! :) I just paste the full size image into a 100x100 and move it around/shrink it with the free-transform tool until I'm satisfied with how it looks. Sometimes if the image is really huge at full size I'll resize it down a few times than paste into a 100x100 and free-transform for the crop. I tend to sharpen after my coloring is completed as well. I find that sharpening during the coloring process actually drags down the image quality. Lately I've been using filter -> high pass at around 0.4 for sharpening. I set the sharpened layer to hard light around 10%. If there are harsh details on the face or hair, I use the blur tool with a small soft round brush and 50% hardness to smooth things out.

Hope that helps! :)