! ASK THE MAKER ! TUTORIAL #01 & #02
First post for the 2016 Ask The Maker; I haven't made tutorials in a while so I apologize before hand for the mess this is going to be, LOL
Thanks to adriftingsea for requesting these ♥
Each tutorial is under a different cut.
THE CAPS
THE BLEND
I really didn't work much on the caps before starting to blend because I wanted the first screencap to remain like that, I needed the black for the blend, and the second screencap had fine lightning that I could adjust after the composition was done.
I cropped the second screencap and set it on Screen 100% and then erased randomly around it using a splatter brush which I'm pretty sure was the third one in this pack resulting in this:
This icon was made for a Random Challenge, so I had to use one determined texture which was
(cr). I dragged the texture under the second cap and set it on Screen at 73% and erased the center of the texture so my subject wouldn't dissapear behind it and used a combo of brushes to do so: I used the common soft brush and some splatter brushes as well, always from the same pack.
The texture is a bit orangey and I wanted more of a bluish hue so I applied an Hue/Saturation level with a clipping mask on it so it would affect only the texture and I turned the Hue to a -27.
THE COLORING/LIGHTNING
At this point, once my composition was done, I worked on the coloring, which was pretty basic, tbh.
First I opened the Brightness/Contrast panel setting it like this:
Brightness +37
Contrast +24
I have an obsession for Lightning in my icons, I litterally use a tons of layers to get the perfect amount of lights and shadows so my psd are full of double layers of the same filters XD
This time though the caps really helped me because they had pretty decent lightning already so all I had to do to bring out more the contrast was adding a layer of Levels: 8 - 1.00 - 236.
When working with Levels I usually just stick to the last value and play around with it since it's the one that bring out the light more. This time I played a little with the shadows too to bring out the contrast.
Then I used a pretty much useless layer of Vibrance: Vibrance +8 - Saturation +9
And last but not least I added one last texture to bring in more light. I used this one
(cr) on Color Dodge at 24%, and that's it.
This icon has so little layers it's almost ridiculous, LOL
THE CAP
THE BASE
This icon was made pretty much backwards, at least for me. I usually make the screencap/stock/image/whatever as base and then build up the textures around it but since this time I had to use one particular texture I started with making my background base. The texture I had was
(cr) and I applied on top of that this one:
from this pack setting it on Overlay 100% to get rid of the grey hue of the other texture. I erased the black letters from all the textures I applied so that they'd still be visible. I didn't want my base texture to dissapear too much.
On top of those I applied this texture
, from the same pack, and setted it on Hue 100%
Since I knew I was going to use that picture of Jimin, I wanted my base to be more red because at first this was supposed to be a red icon in my head clearly something went wrong so I used a fill layer with the color #ff1738 and setted it on Color 100% - still erasing the black letters from each coloring layer.
Now I had a pink-ish hue through all the icon so I wanted it to be more red and I added another Color Fill layer with the color #b60000. Thing is I ended up setting it on Difference at 30% getting a cyan coloring out of it and then I added a level painting the letters full black because the borders were kind of pink-ish now.
textures walkthrough:
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At this point I cropped in Jimin and what I did was use a layer mask to remove the background using some painting brushes, one from this pack, and left a bit of background around him creating a slightly painting effect.
(I also colored white his arm to remove the grating).
THE COLORING/LIGHTNING
The image already had its pretty coloring so I didn't do much except for enhancing what was already there.
First thing I did, as always, was opening my Brightness/Contrast panel to adjust the light. Brightness + 6 / Contrast +16.
I wanted more bold colors from it so I opened the Vibrance panel: Vibrance +30/ Saturation +17
I wanted more movement around him so, probably after trying a hundred different textures, I sampled the background from the original picture, the red-ish behind him, and with a painting brush I colored the corners of the image except for the bottom with the color #d82161 dropping the fill at 30%
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As I said, I have an obsession for lights which is why I opened again the Brightness/Contrast panel adding Contrast +17.
Last thing I did was adding a bit more Vibrance to it to bring out the colors more: Saturation +28 and that's it!