Round One - Challenge Eight - Final Rounds

Congratulations to everyone who's made it to the final round; you've overcome some stiff competition to get here! Dig deep into those wells of creativity, and get ready for this week's challenge.

THEMED SETFor the final rounds, you'll each make five icons along a common theme. Your theme may be ( Read more... )

Results from Challenge Six will be posted later today. No one was eliminated (due to a drop-out in the A. Track), so you're all good to go. ^^

Round One - Challenge Seven

EDIBLES

In other words: food, drinks, candy, etc. Each track will also have a technical challenge to work with--details and examples below. Flickr, Corbis and Getty are all ( Read more... )

Round One - Challenge Six

SELECTIVE COLORS

This is perhaps one of gunshou's favorite effects to use: a black and white image with selective spots of color. You can achieve this in several ways - allow one or two colors of an original image to come through a desaturated layer, or colorize a black and white image in a few select spots. You can find a ( Read more... )

Round One - Challenge Five

TRENDYThis week your challenge is to take an overused (perhaps even ugly) trend and make it pretty again. You can choose one, or mix and match--just make sure it looks good in the end ( Read more... )

Round One - Challenge Four

SCENERYThis week will challenge all of you who are used to making icons of people, and hopefully challenge those of you used to scenery icons to come up with something new. The focus of your icon must be scenery of some kind, not a person or animal. You can use a natural (tree, river, mountain) or architectural ( ( Read more... )

Round One - Challenge Three

MASKING BRUSHES

This third challenge starts the elimination rounds . . . for the Advanced Track only. Due to the attrition in the Enthusiast Track, elimination rounds will start later there.

Many of you mentioned difficulty using masking brushes, so the theme this week is to use at least one mask in your icon. 77words, unmasked_icons, ( Read more... )

Since the comments have gotten a little chaotic, here's a handy chart to help you out with our collaboration challenge:

ADVANCEDASKED
lufiamanaelftartankilts
margyydoodlerusalkatrix (stand-in)
incublossdaga_isa
becbetrusalkatrix (stand-in)
snm_queencrazykeira
annierecklessseraphic_muse
helgarririsxchan
twisted_fruitiegunshou (stand-in)

ENTHUSIASTASKED
irisxchantwisted_fruitie
dagas_isamargyydoodle
crazykeiralufiamanaelf
tartankiltsanniereckless
seraphic_musehelgarrOne of the mods may be asked twice. Once everyone has chosen, the mods will ask the remaining three so that everyone gets a chance to share techniques ( Read more... )

Round One - Challenge Two

COLLABORATIONThis second challenge is also non-elimination (the last non-elim). For this week, please pick an iconmaker competing in the other track and ask them about their favorite iconning technique. Maybe it's a gradient that they love, or that old friend the blue exclusion layer. Or perhaps it's a way of blending ( Read more... )

Round One - Challenge One

FREE-FOR-ALL

This first challenge is non-elimination, in order to give everyone a feel for how this works. There is no theme for this week, just submit your best image icon of any subject.

Special: Please include a sentence or two about why you chose this image. And let us know who/what is in your icon! Not everyone ( Read more... )