A Derek/Stiles tutorial!!!
A tutorial!!!
Because emmyxogast asked for it :P
These are the caps I used for the first icon:
I worked with the one of Derek only first. I cropped it close and left a little bit of space at the top so it looks like this:
Then I did my standard prep work. I duplicated the base layer twice. The first copy I used gaussian blur +5 and set to screen, the second copy I set to soft light, no blur. I left all layers at 100%. Then I did two layers of vibrance, all the way at 100. Yay for colors! That got me this:
Then I used the following two textures, both my mm3butterfly:
I rotated, resized to 100x100, and blurred/smudged them until they looked like this:
I layered both on my icon, set to screen (the blue texture at 100% and the green texture at 73%). On the blue texture, I masked away the bit at the bottom (the white part) and on the green texture, I masked the bit of green that went over the right side of his face. Then I did a layer of selective coloring in the Red tab with Cyan at -64 to put some color back into his face, which gives me this:
Then I took the other cap of Stiles and Derek, cropped it and put it under a black and white gradient map so it looked like this:
Then I c/p it onto my icon, added another vibrance layer at +79, and got this:
Then I copy/merged everything into one layer and duplicated it twice. I left the first layer alone, gaussian blurred +5 the middle layer and set it to screen at 50% opacity, and then set the third layer to soft light at 100%. It was looking a little flat, so I bumped up the contrast to +18 and got this:
Now, some parts of the icon were looking really flat and washed out, so I started paint blobbing some blacks spots. Here’s what they looked like on a white background:
All of the paint blobs were set to soft light. The first was set to 90% opacity, the other two to 100%, and the third was actually duplicated two times, so there were three copies of it. The light had washed Stiles’s face out so much that there was no shadow between his cheek and his nose, and it looked really weird. It took three layers just to get that shadow back.
Then I did yet another vibrance layer +50. I used a lot of vibrance in this icon. Then I copy/merged everything again and sharpened it a little because everything was looking so fuzzy.
Then I used this texture by vetica, set to screen at 100% opacity:
Then I copy/merged everything again and blurred the line between the two levels a little, then copy/merged everything yet again, set that layer to multiply at 25% opacity, and this is what we have now:
Now it’s time for the dividing bars between the two levels. And the idea for dividing bars like this? I totally stole borrowed from calrissian18. I did three horizontal gray bars. I made them in a separate PS window, then just c/p-ed them into this one. The big one was 5 px, the two smaller ones are 2 px. There are two layers of each bar, all set to screen. One layer is at 100% opacity, the second layer is at 75% opacity. Now we’re here:
It was looking just a little flat still, so I added a levels layer. I just set the RGB tab sliders to 15, 1.00, and 255, and badabing badaboom! We have the finished icon!
And there you go! If you read to the end of this, go you! I seriously didn’t think it would be this long, and I don’t remember there being quite so many layers in this icon, but meh. What can you do?
I have two more icons I’m making tutorials for, which should be out tomorrow if anyone’s interested :)