Full Icon Tutorial: Chiaki Kuriyama

Alright, first icon tutorial, so be gentle if I'm not clear enough. Just let me know and I'll fix it up pretty-like.

Today we're going to be going from

this: to this:

using PS7.



We'll start with a lovely picture of Chiaki Kuriyama from the Princess Photobook as Sleeping Beauty, downloaded from welovechiaki



First things first; you're going to crop the image to your liking. Remember, you don't want to crop it so the image is in the center. This gives you little to no room to play with. Rotate it, flip it, whatever you think looks best.



Duplicate the layer once, desaturating the top layer, setting it to "Soft Light":



And upping the contrast on the background. For this one, I put the contrast at about 40 and lowered the brightness so Chiaki's nose didn't disappear.



We're not going to touch the sharpness on this one. I realise this makes it look fuzzy and a bit awkward at this point, but it adds to the glow-like feel of the original image. Trust me on this one, sharpening makes it look yucky.

Now, we're going to create a new layer between the second and third layer. Fill it in with #465663



Set it to exclusion and you'll have this:



Now, we could leave it like this, but it looks far too washed out. So we're going to create another layer on top and fill it with #662620 and set it to "Soft Light":



We end up with this:



Don't worry, the hard part's over now. Now create another new layer and use the "Foreground to Transparent" gradient with white selected as your foreground colour. Drag it from the bottom right-hand corner to just above the middle of the icon, pulling it at a slight angle. Toy with the gradient to your liking and you should have something like this:



At this point, your icon will look like so:



One more step, grasshoppa.

You can either put your own text in, or use someone's text brush, which I did. For this one, I found a lovely brush made by lostfaithdesign from a Greenday lyric.



You could add a border if you'd like, but I thought it looked lovely all on it's own. Sort of a soft glow to it.

Your final product should look a bit like this one:



If you have any questions or complaints, let me know. I'd love to see how others icons turn out using this tutorial, so if you want to show it off, here's your chance. I'd also suggest that you don't follow this step-by-step, colour-by-colour. It makes things really boring and you can definitely tweak this one to make some fabulous, very original icons of your own. This is, after all, a very basic tutorial and meant to be more of a stepping stone. So stretch your wings, darlings ;)



Final product is up for grabs. Just make sure to credit elixir_icons.