Whee tutorial

Okay, kids. This is a tutorial for an icon I made that I... actually rather
liked. This tutorial was written in Photoshop CS2, although I'm positive it can
be translated easily to other versions of PS or even PSP and GIMP. Please do not
reproduce this exact icon with this tutorial, but experiment with your own
images and tweak these settings.

Today we will be making this icon

We start with the
basic picture.
We resize, crop, and then sharpen a little bit until you like how it looks. Then
you duplicate the layer, desaturate the new layer, and set it on soft light.

Now we have this:

All right, now that we have our base, time to mess with it a bit. Merge all your
layers.

I pasted a layer of a base made by

disappearicons and set it on overlay.

Now we have a really nice pattern and some nice colors on it. It's still a bit
dull in colors though, so we will now put a gradient layer (probably by
crumblingwalls... I'm not sure, actually) over the whole thing and set it on
soft light with 50% opacity.

Now we set another gradient the other way on soft light 100%.

Now it looks a tad too washed out, so I duplicate the base layer, drag it up to
the top, desaturated, and set it to soft light at 65%.

Now we bring back the nice base from earlier and duplicate it, dragging the new
layer to the top set on overlay 100% fo ra more intense look.

Make a new layer over everything. Now we take
bontrold's sparkly brush set and
brush over parts of the icon as you like in white. Set this to overlay. (The
image shown here is on a black background to show you what it looks like.