endearest (no. 43): magicmachine

endearest in magicmachine

endearest (no. 43)

Jan 02, 2012 20:24

a Tutorial

or how an amazing cap & a handful of habits can make an icon

❶ This cap hold everything that is right with screencaps. It's a silhouette, the subject is looking down, it's colour rich (warm tones) AND emotive. It's from Rawr-Caps which is my go to these days cause they are amazingly fast and also broad in their tastes.

❷ (Uncharacteristically for me, I edited this cap before I cropped it) Duplicate the cap & set to soft light, it's not quite dark enough so duplicate the soft light layer again.

❸ Ctrl+A then Ctrl+C. Open a new canvas (100x100) and Ctrl+V. Ctrl+T and resize to a my personal favorite and over abused, centered crop. Normally I'm a hoe for negative space but in this crop I fell like the black of her face offers that starkness.

❹ At this point I want to add some colour to the shadows as well as get rid of the distracting background wall. Normally I might use colour balance to add red tones to the shadows and/or cut out our darling Mary Margret but apparently I was feeling lazy so: Layer -> New Fill Layer -> Gradient... You can see in the screencap here where I masked the fill off of her face.

❺ Incase you were wondering the settings. They're nothing to exciting. The colour was a nice burnt orange shade #a04204, something that was similar to what was already present in the image.

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(right-click view image)
❻ After research I feel a little guilty of this step! I grabbed the above image off of tumblr some time ago, thinking it was a texture. In fact it's a stunning piece of Blow Pen Art by Shane McAdams (more can be viewed here). Any-who, I desaturated it, pasted it into my workspace, rotated it & set it to screen! Sorry & thanks Shane, promise I won't do it again ♥

❼ If you have ever read a tutorial by me before you will be well familiar with this step. Vibrance Layer, Vibrance +100. The texture was added for interest and as a canvas to add text but in adding it, it stole away a lot of the coloured space: vibrance gives a bit of punch back!

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❽ This is a tutorial of habits, and here's one of my many. I actually had gotten to the end of the icon when I added this but reviewing the PSD, this is the layer in which I dragged it down too. I must've thought it was missing a little something (most likely some more softsoftsoftness)! Stamp a new layer and then drag it down. The hard edge of the image was too much for the mood of the icon so I used a soft brush on the layer mask drew a line holding shift, to remove the hard edge.

❾ ADDING TEXT, oh text how you are a heartless bitch. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't but it's always worth trying. The font I used was called 'DaunPenh' at 10pt, each line has a different kerning (200pt, 400pt & 600pt). As for the colouring, I used the colour dropper to pick colours from the image. When the colours were a little too light I added a drop shadow (double click the layer in the palette - Drop Shadow -> Blend Mode = Multiply [orange colour], Distance = 1, Size & Spread = 0, 15% opacity)

❿ I like to always have a colouring layer above my text as it helps to assimilate it into the icon, also this icon needed a bit more colour punch & vibrance may've been overkill! So add another gradient fill layer (same settings as earlier) but this time set change the blend mode to soft light. It was a little dark so I masked some away from the edge.

And that, my friends, is that. If you would like to ask any questions or for me to clarify any steps or thought processes, just ask! This tutorial was prompted by icon_talk's Ask the Maker meme (specifally in partial answering to justonebeat [any tut] & mm3butterfly [non-black shadows]) and by the fact I realized that while I can't make icons at the moment, tut's are doable XD