I love experimenting with new icon-ing tecniques and I always get lots of ideas from looking at tutorials. So I thought, why not try my hand at doing a tutorial myself? So here it is. For one of my favourite icons which I enjoyed making and playing about with.

This is my first tutorial, but I’ve tried my best to make it easy to follow. So it’s quite drawn out and image intensive. A moderate knowledge and familiarity with Photoshop would be helpful, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to come up with something similar. Please don’t copy this tutorial exactly because, really, what would be the point? And hopefully this’ll inspire people to come up with some nice icons, which is what most tutorials do for me :)

This is what I’ll be explaining how to make…

…using Adobe Photoshop 7.0.

1) I started off with this cap…

…from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (taken by teh_indy.)

2) Then, using the select tool and holding down the shift key, I selected a square-shaped area with Harry to the left side of the square. I cropped the image using Image, Crop, then resized it to 100x100 pixels through Image, Image Size and altering the dimensions in the boxes.
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3) Now, that’s made the image kind of blurry, so I sharpened the image (Filter, Sharpen, Sharpen), and then used Edit, Fade Sharpen, lowering the opacity to around 55% to make the lines less harsh.


4) The image looks too dark and shadowed, so I duplicated the layer twice setting the first duplicate (the one directly above the original image) to Screen, and the second layer (the top one) to Soft Light. Then I re-selected the bottom original layer and went to Image, Adjustments, Levels to alter the image a bit more. I fiddled around with the sliders until I got something I liked, with the ‘input levels’ numbers at around 43;1.55;202. I then used Layer, Merge Visible to create just the one layer which was easier to work with.
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5) Next, I used the Lasso tool to outline Harry in the image. Once I’d done that, I used Select, Inverse so that it was now the area around Harry that was selected. I right-clicked on that layer in the Layers Window, and selected ‘Layer via Copy’. (Doing this meant that I could now work on the background section of the image on a separate layer, so it would be easier to make any changes to the ‘Harry’ area if I wanted to.)


6) Leaving the background area selected on the new layer, I then went to Filter, Blur, Motion Blur and with an angle of around -63° and a distance of 999 I made the background into something like this…


7) Now to add some interesting stuff. First, I created a new layer, then using the line tool I drew one horizontal on two vertical white lines on the bottom and right sides of the image, like this… (I’ve coloured the background black just to make the lines easier to see.)

I set this layer to Soft Light. Then I created another new layer and used the Eyedropper tool to pick out a creamy colour from Harry’s face. I drew a vertical line with this colour in between the other two vertical lines and set this layer to Colour Dodge.
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8) Finally, I added three light textures to the image. The first was this…

…by spaceyme, which I set to Screen at 75% opacity.

The second was this…

…by colorfilter. I flipped this one both horizontally and vertically (using Edit, Transform, Flip Horizontal/Flip Vertical) and then set it to screen at 35%.

The final texture was the same as the previous, but this time just flipped horizontally. I set this to Screen at 75%.

And so here’s what the final layer palette should look like...


And here's the finished icon:


Hope this was helpful!