alright, ive spent the better of the past three days going thru the resources page, the faq page, and going back thru entries but my question it seems is not answered

i want to make some icons with smaller images inside of the icon
ive tried (see here:)

but no avail the quality of the resized image is no where near the other one,
what im looking for is to be able to create an image like this
credit to: wildchild199

thanks for any help and also thank you to all of you who post your tutorials, as someone who taught herself photoshop (not very well i may add) any help to understand it is well appreciated.

thanks

lisa