Full Icon Tutorial #1

My very first full icon tutorial. I thought this day would never come. Well, being my first full icon tut I decided to start with a pretty simple icon. All you've gotta do is follow the cut.

Hey if you end up liking this icon tutorial please comment it makes me feel important. I would also love to see your work. Anyway, here we go

We will be taking this:

base and turning into this icon

.

I just loved the studio poster for Serenity and my favorite character is River so I cropped out her and little Inara who is way in the back. Everyone wave to Inara, hi Inara. Anyway that left me with my base.

Looks great but its just little too blurry for my taste so I went to Filter>Sharpen>Sharpen to clean up their faces a bit. Repeat this step if your image needs it (hint: if you need something between one and two sharpen try using the fade sharpen in the edit menu). Great I can see the maniacal glint in River's eyes, not it is time to get down to some hard core layering.

Lately I have been obsessed with dark blue exclusions. Why? Couldn't tell you, just am, so I made a new layer and filled it will #000033 and set that layer to exclusion. It makes the blacks of the image have a blue tint.It should now look like this:

Now I wanted to give it a sort of muted brownish-grey sort of tone since that is what the image looked like in the first place and why mess with perfection? So I created a new layer filled it with #D7D2B2 and set that layer to Multiply. The image now looks like this: . I love it, its amazing, it just... well it needs something more, I kinda miss my blue exclusion so now we are bringing it back (how retro). Right click on the image and select Layer 3. Then go up to you Layer menu and select Duplicate Layer and click ok. Then go back to Layer and select Arrange>Bring To Front (or use Shift+Control+]). Gosh that looks great. But I really wanted River and Inara to stand out so I flattened the layers by using Layer>Flatten Image and went over to my trust Image menu and selected Image>Adjustment>Selective Color. Select Blacks on the pull down menu and set the black slider to about 12%. The icon should now look like this:

Now for the finishing touches. I put a 1px border around the icon using stroke and decided to add some text. This brush was made by Colortone but be creative and use whatever you want, its your icon. You are now finished. Go forth and make beautiful icons.
Final Result: