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I guess you could just handtype alot of tinytext, but thats boring :I

1)First, go through books you have lying around. CDbooks or other, these make great text bases. Scanaway.

2)Second, crop out a square that is a matching number length and width, that will resize to 100x100. 234x234 687x687, it doesn't matter as long as they match. The bigger the better, as scanning can ruin quality, and the more it resizes - the more smooth and clear your image will be after you size it down. (plus you want tinytext, thats all the rage).



I picked a nirvana scan. I cropped it at 325x325, and resized my image to 100x100. Now, youre going to want beige to white backgrounds for this stuff - luckily thats what books almost always have. If you look closely though, youll still see imperfections in your imagepixels, so we're going to fix that.



3)First, duplicate your layer and set it to screen. This will fade everything out. Merge, and then go to colors>adjust brightness and contrast. Set the markers to darker, mild, and bold. This will make all the black/dark text and image pop back out. Voolah, our image is now pixelfree. For images that have dark/black backgrounds, you will want to use overlay instead of screen.

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4) Go into painshop or paint and blot out any parts you want, to make the base less crowded. If you had done this before adjusting the contrast and screening, the blotted out parts woould have been easy to spot.




4)You may choose to sharpen, but I find it best not to sharpen bases, as most people sharpen their icons several times, and if you have a base that is one step more sharpened than the rest of the icon image, its going to start looking sick and pixely. It will get sharpened when people edit their icons. :)