» tutorial 008; i want a girl with uninterrupted prosperity
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A few notes, before we start:
» This icon was originally posted here, for War 1, Trial 2 at 21tvthrowdown.
» Program: Photoshop CS5.
» Difficulty: Easy-moderate.
Here's the original screencap of Nikita from 1x22. In this scene she was toughing it out through a few broken ribs iirc, so I wanted to try and do something with the expression of pain on her face.
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1. First I sized it down and thought I'd emphasize the difference between the darkness of her clothing, and the brightness of her face. At the same time I didn't want to include the bright spot on her forehead, so I left that part out. The result was an overwhelming amount of black, which I thought would leave me room for textures or text or... something, later down the road.
Then I lightened everything the heck up by making a new curves layer, hitting auto, then adding two points on the RGB grid: (93, 64) and (185, 173). They picked up all the blacks and lightened up the lights, to the point where everything's all yucky and pixellated now.
So to address that, we'll just copy merge (CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-E) everything, gaussian blur it (FILTER > BLUR > GAUSSIAN) at 2.0, and set it to luminosity. It's waaay too blurry for my purposes right now... so let's just make it invisible by clicking the little eye next to the layer and leave the pixellation for now.
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2. We'll come back to that in a bit, but for now, let's get some colouring started without being distracted by the blurriness. Set a light green colour fill layer (#8bcf43) to soft light 100%, then a texture by happy_harper13 set to soft light 100%, and then a dark green (#042a08) set to screen 100%.
Gross.
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3. Copy merge all layers, gaussian blur it at 2.0, and set it to soft light 65% to reintroduce some depth.
Still gross.
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4. Oh well, let's just keep going.
Dark pink (#c35959) set to soft light 100% to make it look warmer, then a vibrance +100 layer to pick up the yellows.
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5. Now we're going to modify this texture by midnight_road by rotating it 90 clockwise (EDIT > TRANSFORM > ROTATE 90 DEGREES CW) and fiddling with its brightness/contrast (IMAGE > ADJUSTMENTS > BRIGHTNESS/CONTRAST) by dimming it -50 and upping the contrast +100. Then set it to soft light 100% for some more bursts of colour.
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6. This texture (by ???) was set to screen 100%. It's probably been desaturated, blurred maybe, and brightness/contrast fiddled with?
Anyway the point of this texture is to mess a little more with the lighting.
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7. Alright, at this point I could finally no longer ignore the pixellation, so before I deal with the washed-outness, remember that blurred luminosity layer way down at the bottom? Make it visible again. Go back up to the top and copy merge everything and set that layer to soft light 100%. Then go back and make the luminosity layer invisible again.
As I am writing this tutorial out it has occurred to me that obviously I like to do things the difficult way instead of just using a simple layer mask. Idk I would probably make this icon much differently now, but wateva wateva
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8. Okay, more adjustment layers now to even out the whites. Vibrance +100, then levels (19, 0.69, 255) to make everything darker.
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9. Now a light brown (#936237) set to soft light 100% to make everything a little warmer.
Finally, another auto curves layer with two RGB points: (45, 63) and (146, 170) to make everything darker still.
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10. This texture by midnight_road, set to soft light 100%, is going to add some colour movement.
At this point I gave up and used the blur and smudge tools to get rid of the pixellation and deepen it all into blacks.
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11. Now a black to white vertical gradient fill layer, scale 150%, set to soft light 77%.
Finally, copy merge all. This is what we're going to start blocking with.
HOKAY, time for part two! As you can see, whatever I've got right now is a big terrible mess. There's too much black overpowering the icon, and she's squished way up at the top because whatever I'd pictured was going to happen to this icon didn't end up happening. So let's hide all that by blocking!!!
Let me just preface this section by admitting that I'm really uncomfortable with blocking. I have no idea how to do it without just hitting buttons and going with my gut, and I have no idea what mathematically constitutes a well balanced block icon in terms of ratio and spacing and all that stuff. So... yeah. A lot of this next part is going to be basically "and hit this button and move it there and leave it because it doesn't look all that bad." Which, uh, now that I am reading that sentence, looks an awful lot like how the rest of this tutorial went anyway.
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12. Alright, so let's just create a new 100x100 canvas and drag the copy merged layer from before onto this nice new one. Duplicate it and hide one of the copies in case everything gets messed up.
Let's start with cropping the most interesting part of this icon: her face. I think I randomly dragged across a part with the marquee tool and cut it out and then positioned it sort of in the center, because that's where I... I don't know, thought the focal point was going to be.
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13. Again! Since I cut her chin off last time I decided to focus on that and her mouth this time. I could say I moved it to the right because of the movement of her face and how it seemed natural... but lbr I had no idea what I was doing.
Then I duplicated that layer and dragged it below the other layers before moving it up to the top. Now it sorta seems like her chin is moving in a straight diagonal line? That doesn't make sense, does it?
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14. I liked the colours going on the top left of the original icon, so I cropped that out and moved it down to the bottom to fill some space.
Then one more crop getting some of her face, moved under the other layers.
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15. It's getting weird now, so I decided to just go all the way weird and duplicated the original layer and moved it to the bottom of the stack. But the colours don't flow that well imo, so I stretched it vertically (CTRL-T) to get the greens back.
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16. Okay, just a few (...lol) colouring steps left to sort of make the blocks look like they weren't just randomly cut up and pasted together, and then this'll be done. First, copy merged everything and that's going to be our new "base."
Then take a dark pink (#c35959), set to soft light 100%, and duplicate the base, gaussian blur it at 2.0, and set it to soft light 100%.
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17. Much better looking already, but the blacks are overpowering things again. So this texture (by ???) was set to screen 15%.
Remember that midnight_road texture from before that gave great yellow/green lines? Bring it back and set it to soft light 100%.
Also bring back that happy_harper13 texture for some overall lighting at soft light 100%.
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18. At this point I wanted to sharpen the icon, but before I could do that, I had to blur the lines between the blocks with the blur tool at around 20% or else they'd get oversharpened. Then I could sharpen (FILTER > ARTISTIC > PAINT DAUBS > 1, 1).
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19. Final colours coming up! Green (#558713) set to soft light 100%.
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20. The edges of one of the blocks was still too sharp for my liking, so I blurred that.
Finally, reddish brown (#8d4b2e) set to soft light 100% for some more warmth. And tada!
Comments would be great, and if you have anything else you'd like to ask, feel free to hit me up here! I'm sloooooowly, but steadily making my way through the rest of these tutorials ahha :)