Snowflake Challenge Day 11 - Icons
Talk about your creative process(es) - anything from the initial inspiration to how you feel after something’s done. Do you struggle with motivation or is it a smooth process? Do you have any tricks up your sleeve to pull out when a fanwork isn’t cooperating? What is your level of planning to pantsing/winging it?
I make icons! A lot of them!
I've seen two people answer this challenge day with a laconic "find screenshot - make icon - done". Well, no. :)
(
seraphina_snape has since written a whole tutorial about her process. Go praise her, it's awesome! (I feel guilty.))
1) Inspiration
My iconing process always starts with watching something beautiful and wanting to spend more time with it. Usually that's a tv show. It hits me while I'm watching that I love a particular scene or camera angle or facial expression.
2) Resources
I usually do all the screencapping myself. I cap the scenes that fascinate me right while I'm watching them. (I have over 2000 Guardian screencaps from the 30 eps I watched so far.)
I also google for textures (usually DeviantArt). I already have thousands of textures from icon- and texture-makers on LJ, but there are no new ones coming. (That scene is dead.) We're trying to keep it alive on DW (see
icon_resources).
3) Masking and Cropping
The first thing I do is mask the subject. Almost none of my icons (from the last three years) have their natural background intact. I use the lasso and the quick mask tool and mask them. I do this at full size. Then I crop to 100x100. I like to work in the final size because I hate losing small details at the last minute.
Most often, I do mid-range crops and end up with busts:
4) Sharpening and Coloring and Light Effects and Textures
These three four things (and nice red uniforms) are not always done in the same order. I usually start with some sharpening, then some color adjustments. Then I start adding textures, and then do some blurring and more coloring again at the end.
I have several different ways of coloring icons, but most of them are flat and light and pastel lately. This involves Lighten and Soft Light layers, and often Gradient Maps. (I wrote a tutorial about that style two years ago here.)
5) Text
This is the point where I usually headdesk, because I forgot to plan for text during step 3. /o\
This almost always happens. Either I start over with a different crop (but usually too much work has already gone into it, so I rarely do that), or I leave it textless, or I try to force the text onto it despite there not being a good place to put it. *sigh* Sometimes I can shift the subject to the side without much hassle (i.e. without losing the coloring/texture layers). But often I end up with text centered behind the (centered) subject. The fact that Chinese is written from top to bottom - at least when you're trying to be artsy :) - also keeps throwing me off my game.
You can tell that these were not cropped with text in mind:
These, on the other hand, were:
(I don't see much of a difference. :))
On average, it takes me about 20 minutes to make an icon. More if there's text on it, even more if I make it for an "important" challenge, like a lims or a rumble. I usually don't look at the result again before posting, except for the "important" ones. I make a point of looking at them again the next day before submitting them (and then fiddling with them and fixing little things). It helps a lot.
x-posted from dw (comments:
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