Pete Doherty icon tutorial!
Okay, internet! Prepare to be amazed! I got bored & decided I'd try my hand at making a quick icon tutorial.
This tutorial assumes basic knowledge of Photoshop tools but is otherwise pretty much absurdly quicky'n'easy.
We'll be going from this picture of Pete Doherty to this:
!
Program: Photoshop 7.0. I'd guess it's easily translated, but I don't know for sure?
Okay, so the first thing you're going to want to do is crop your picture into a square. Try to find something that looks interesting; I'd advise not centering the person's face. For this picture, I rotated it with Free Transform before cropping it. Then I did that good old-fashioned Image --> Image Size --> and resized it to 100 x 100. Obvs! ... and then I used a black brush to get rid of the random guy next to Pete who I totally didn't notice until I'd got my icon all cropped. That bit probably won't apply to most of you, but there it is. So anyway!
After getting rid of the random guy's face, I decided the image wasn't clear enough, so I went to "Filter" and used Sharpen once.
So this was the base I came up with:
Now, duplicate your base layer twice. The first duplicated layer should be set to Screen. For this picture, I put it at 60% opacity -- you may want it higher or lower, depending on how bright your picture already is. The second layer should be set to Soft Light, 100% and put on top.
It should look like this, making Pete look a bit like a deer in headlights:
Next thing you want to do is create a blank new layer between the Screen and Soft Light layers. Fill it with a dark blue color -- I used #29215C -- and set the layer to Exclusion, opacity left at 100%.
You'll now have something like this, with Pete now looking a bit like he's got jaundice:
I thought it actually looked pretty decent at that point, but I wasn't quite content with the color scheme. I decided to make myself a nice reddish sort of gradient, going from a dull reddish color to a pale yellowy thing.
This is the gradient I ended up using --
.
I set the gradient to Multiply and 43%. You may want to fiddle around with the opacity on this, depending on the brightness of your image and all that rubbish. Playing around some more, I decided that the gradient looked best as the layer underneath the blue exclusion layer. It also looks fine the other way around; this's another little chance to experiment. (You'll still want to have that duplicated base layer up on top, the one we set to Soft Light a little bit ago.)
So the icon now looks like this:
And I'm actually quite fond of it at the moment! Darling Pete looks a bit lonely, though, so I decide to toss some extra bits and bobs at the blank space off to his right.
I decided to use a photo I'd taken about a year back in Baltimore to liven things up a bit. This's the light texture I made:
I pasted it into a new layer, which I decided to set to Pin light, and then erased the bits that were covering up Pete.
I ended up with this:
Now, I quite liked that, but wasn't wholly sure that was it, you know? So I played around with a few other things, and finally settled on this texture, which I made myself from a stock photo:
I put it above the other light texture layer, but still under that Soft Light layer with Pete on it.
So it looked like this, a little warmer and all eh?:
For my finishing touches -- and pretty much everything here-on out is optional -- I added a bit of text and a one-pixel dark blue border around the whole thing, just to make it look polished. At this point, you can feel free to add any sort of text you'd like. I couldn't think of any in particular for this icon, so I just tossed on a random play off a song title/album title. Oh, and I decided to duplicate the Screen layer from earlier, because I figured at this point the icon could use a little extra brightening up.
So your final layer pallete will be something like this:
And voila, the finished icon, now with randomly space-wasting text:
!
The font I used is "barat" by
lalizzie, if you're wondering.
Anyway, so this's my first tut -- if you've got any questions or anything is worded too incoherently, let me know and I'll do my best to answer you and/or fix it, eh? Hopefully it's of some help to someone, somewhere. Hahaha.
Let me know if it's any help, eh?
xx
This tutorial assumes basic knowledge of Photoshop tools but is otherwise pretty much absurdly quicky'n'easy.
We'll be going from this picture of Pete Doherty to this:
Program: Photoshop 7.0. I'd guess it's easily translated, but I don't know for sure?
Okay, so the first thing you're going to want to do is crop your picture into a square. Try to find something that looks interesting; I'd advise not centering the person's face. For this picture, I rotated it with Free Transform before cropping it. Then I did that good old-fashioned Image --> Image Size --> and resized it to 100 x 100. Obvs! ... and then I used a black brush to get rid of the random guy next to Pete who I totally didn't notice until I'd got my icon all cropped. That bit probably won't apply to most of you, but there it is. So anyway!
After getting rid of the random guy's face, I decided the image wasn't clear enough, so I went to "Filter" and used Sharpen once.
So this was the base I came up with:
Now, duplicate your base layer twice. The first duplicated layer should be set to Screen. For this picture, I put it at 60% opacity -- you may want it higher or lower, depending on how bright your picture already is. The second layer should be set to Soft Light, 100% and put on top.
It should look like this, making Pete look a bit like a deer in headlights:
Next thing you want to do is create a blank new layer between the Screen and Soft Light layers. Fill it with a dark blue color -- I used #29215C -- and set the layer to Exclusion, opacity left at 100%.
You'll now have something like this, with Pete now looking a bit like he's got jaundice:
I thought it actually looked pretty decent at that point, but I wasn't quite content with the color scheme. I decided to make myself a nice reddish sort of gradient, going from a dull reddish color to a pale yellowy thing.
This is the gradient I ended up using --
I set the gradient to Multiply and 43%. You may want to fiddle around with the opacity on this, depending on the brightness of your image and all that rubbish. Playing around some more, I decided that the gradient looked best as the layer underneath the blue exclusion layer. It also looks fine the other way around; this's another little chance to experiment. (You'll still want to have that duplicated base layer up on top, the one we set to Soft Light a little bit ago.)
So the icon now looks like this:
And I'm actually quite fond of it at the moment! Darling Pete looks a bit lonely, though, so I decide to toss some extra bits and bobs at the blank space off to his right.
I decided to use a photo I'd taken about a year back in Baltimore to liven things up a bit. This's the light texture I made:
I pasted it into a new layer, which I decided to set to Pin light, and then erased the bits that were covering up Pete.
I ended up with this:
Now, I quite liked that, but wasn't wholly sure that was it, you know? So I played around with a few other things, and finally settled on this texture, which I made myself from a stock photo:
I put it above the other light texture layer, but still under that Soft Light layer with Pete on it.
So it looked like this, a little warmer and all eh?:
For my finishing touches -- and pretty much everything here-on out is optional -- I added a bit of text and a one-pixel dark blue border around the whole thing, just to make it look polished. At this point, you can feel free to add any sort of text you'd like. I couldn't think of any in particular for this icon, so I just tossed on a random play off a song title/album title. Oh, and I decided to duplicate the Screen layer from earlier, because I figured at this point the icon could use a little extra brightening up.
So your final layer pallete will be something like this:
And voila, the finished icon, now with randomly space-wasting text:
The font I used is "barat" by
lalizzie, if you're wondering.Anyway, so this's my first tut -- if you've got any questions or anything is worded too incoherently, let me know and I'll do my best to answer you and/or fix it, eh? Hopefully it's of some help to someone, somewhere. Hahaha.
Let me know if it's any help, eh?
xx