AIR tutorial
1. Grab your base, crop, resize, sharpen, whatever. I started with an AIR base from shiroitsubasa.
2. Go to Hue/Saturation and increase the Saturation by 100% (this level will vary depending on your icon!).
3. Set this gradient by staticromance04 to Burn at 100% (DO NOT resize).
4. Create a new fill layer, color ff8eb8, set to Soft Light at 100%.
5. Create a new fill layer, color 00005f. GIMPers, duplicate this layer twice: set the bottom two layers to Screen, and the top layer to Subtract at 57%. Photoshop/PSP, this is basically an Exclusion layer.
6. Open a new 100x100 blank canvas. Fill with a central color from your icon; I chose 518dc3 (the blue from the background). Set this brush by wicked_enough to Screen.
(look, the little dots are blue!)
7. Merge all the layers of your icon. Resize to 94x94, and paste onto your border canvas.
Whee, you're done! I'd love to see your results!