tutorial: dear god, no! aka, how to butcher your icon in ten easy steps.
Have you ever wanted to make an icon that was creative, unique, and memorable? Have you ever wondered how people make icons that stick in your memory days after you seen them? Icons whose specters you just can't be rid of? Icons so glorious that you may never look at an icon the same way again?
If you have, this tutorial is for you.
I, Jehnt, have braved the uncharted territories of
icon_tutorial (and other, much less reputable communities) to bring you the latest (and not-so-latest) advances in retina-burning, eye-scarring, "oh god, I'll need to dig my eyeballs out with a spork" icon creation.
BEHOLD:
to 
or 
effects used:
bird effect, rainbow effect, squares effect, flower effect, shiny effect, pink blob effect, sharpen effect, gorgeous blue effect, black effect, and lines effect.
I'm not sure if it's translatable so if you use PSP or GIMP you may just be SOL.
And special thanks toiconrants, without whom this would not have been possible.
1.
Get your original picture and crop it. Mine is a picture of a gorgeous yet jailbaity male model whose eyebrows annoyingly don't match his hair. But like whatever! Because we're totally going to transform him.
2.
He looked a bit pale and colorless, so we're going to make a new selective color layer with these values:
Reds, -100, +100, +100.
Yellows, -100, 0, +100.
(To create a selective color layer, on the layers palette you click the little circle of "Create New Adjustment Layer" and then pick "selective color" from the fly-up box.)
3.
With your brush or pencil on 1 px, draw a line around him in the color of his suit! (To draw a line, you click and carefully drag your mouse along where you want the line to be.)
4.
Select the color black and choose a soft brush on a decent size like 19 or 27 px. Paint around him in black (to paint, you click and drag while the paintbrush is selected). To get your lines to show up, drag them above the black layer and then click Image>Adjustments>Invert.
5.
Blue is in right now, and our model needs more of it!. Make a new channel mix layer and put your settings like so:
Red, +70, -26, +6
Green, -14, +100, -4
Blue, +6, 0, +100
6.
Add a flower to make him beautiful! Mine is a transparent png by Timounette, so I just had to drag it onto my icon and resize until it fit in his hair!
7.
Add a texture for visual interest. This is also by Timounette and I just put it on screen.
8.
The colors didn't really "pop," so I added a hue/saturation layer of saturation +40.
9.
We want to add some little squares. The way to do that is to pick your rectangle tool, shift-click and drag to create a square, and then duplicate it once. Drag it several pixels over and floodfill it with a different color. Right click on the duplicate layer and merge down. Now you should have a layer with TWO squares on it. Duplicate that layer, move it a few pixels up, and floodfill the squares with different colors.
10.
A lot of people are using the "shiny" effect right now. To get it, pick a tan color, color over the picture a bit with the soft brush, and then use Gaussian Blur (Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur) on a setting of about 10 or so to soften it. To get the pink light, select a hot pink color and then just stamp a circle on with the 45 or 65 px soft brush. Set both layers to screen.
11.
To get the bird, go to photoshop's custom shapes. From the dropdown shape menu, click the animal set. Shift-click and drag so that your bird stays properly-proportioned. To get that rainbow effect, go to Layer>New Fill Layer>Pattern, check the box that says "Use previous layer to create clipping mask" or something similar (what that does is makes it so the new layer will only cover the areas that the previous layer covers, so it won't alter the colors of the background or anything), and then hit okay. When the dialog box pops up, you can pick a pattern selection. The rainbow is one of photoshop's defaults.
12.
Sharpen a few times and you're done!
Cross-posted toicon_tutorial.
And please, kids, remember that this is an example of how to butcher your icon, not how to make it pretty. Only follow this tutorial if you want your icon to die a protracted, ignoble death.
p.s. - my real icon tutorial was far more decent.
If you have, this tutorial is for you.
I, Jehnt, have braved the uncharted territories of
icon_tutorial (and other, much less reputable communities) to bring you the latest (and not-so-latest) advances in retina-burning, eye-scarring, "oh god, I'll need to dig my eyeballs out with a spork" icon creation.BEHOLD:
effects used:
bird effect, rainbow effect, squares effect, flower effect, shiny effect, pink blob effect, sharpen effect, gorgeous blue effect, black effect, and lines effect.
I'm not sure if it's translatable so if you use PSP or GIMP you may just be SOL.
And special thanks to
iconrants, without whom this would not have been possible.1.
Get your original picture and crop it. Mine is a picture of a gorgeous yet jailbaity male model whose eyebrows annoyingly don't match his hair. But like whatever! Because we're totally going to transform him.
2.
He looked a bit pale and colorless, so we're going to make a new selective color layer with these values:
Reds, -100, +100, +100.
Yellows, -100, 0, +100.
(To create a selective color layer, on the layers palette you click the little circle of "Create New Adjustment Layer" and then pick "selective color" from the fly-up box.)
3.
With your brush or pencil on 1 px, draw a line around him in the color of his suit! (To draw a line, you click and carefully drag your mouse along where you want the line to be.)
4.
Select the color black and choose a soft brush on a decent size like 19 or 27 px. Paint around him in black (to paint, you click and drag while the paintbrush is selected). To get your lines to show up, drag them above the black layer and then click Image>Adjustments>Invert.
5.
Blue is in right now, and our model needs more of it!. Make a new channel mix layer and put your settings like so:
Red, +70, -26, +6
Green, -14, +100, -4
Blue, +6, 0, +100
6.
Add a flower to make him beautiful! Mine is a transparent png by Timounette, so I just had to drag it onto my icon and resize until it fit in his hair!
7.
Add a texture for visual interest. This is also by Timounette and I just put it on screen.
8.
The colors didn't really "pop," so I added a hue/saturation layer of saturation +40.
9.
We want to add some little squares. The way to do that is to pick your rectangle tool, shift-click and drag to create a square, and then duplicate it once. Drag it several pixels over and floodfill it with a different color. Right click on the duplicate layer and merge down. Now you should have a layer with TWO squares on it. Duplicate that layer, move it a few pixels up, and floodfill the squares with different colors.
10.
A lot of people are using the "shiny" effect right now. To get it, pick a tan color, color over the picture a bit with the soft brush, and then use Gaussian Blur (Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur) on a setting of about 10 or so to soften it. To get the pink light, select a hot pink color and then just stamp a circle on with the 45 or 65 px soft brush. Set both layers to screen.
11.
To get the bird, go to photoshop's custom shapes. From the dropdown shape menu, click the animal set. Shift-click and drag so that your bird stays properly-proportioned. To get that rainbow effect, go to Layer>New Fill Layer>Pattern, check the box that says "Use previous layer to create clipping mask" or something similar (what that does is makes it so the new layer will only cover the areas that the previous layer covers, so it won't alter the colors of the background or anything), and then hit okay. When the dialog box pops up, you can pick a pattern selection. The rainbow is one of photoshop's defaults.
12.
Sharpen a few times and you're done!
Cross-posted to
icon_tutorial.And please, kids, remember that this is an example of how to butcher your icon, not how to make it pretty. Only follow this tutorial if you want your icon to die a protracted, ignoble death.
p.s. - my real icon tutorial was far more decent.