Tutorial #1: Sarah McLachlan
Anyway, this tutorial is on how to create the following icon:
1. First, open a new image sized 100x100. Leave it empty and blank.
2. Choose a picture. I chose one of Sarah McLachlan from All Stars Online. (What can I say; my adoration rockets sky-high when favorite artists wear any piece of clothing with a Star Wars character on it.)
3. Try picking out what's interesting about the picture. Personally, I loved her expression, and Chewbacca on the hat. My cropping will revolve around those two things.
4. First up, Chewbacca. It will be the biggest part of the icon, and the easiest to mess with. After sharpening, fiddling, cropping, and sizing it down to 48x95px (my own preference), here's the result:
5. Next, her expression. Reverse Sarah, and crop the right side, the side with the most light and least hat. And then even more sharpening, fiddling, cropping, and sizing to 34x69px (again, my own preference), I ended up with this:
6. Now you can take those two pictures, and place them onto the blank image you first created. Fiddle with the placement. I'm left-handed, and I firmly believe this is why all my icons tend to have some focus somewhere on the left side. Maybe you'll prefer stuff on the right, or, heck, maybe you'll want the icon to appear upside-down. Whatever you prefer, do your placing that way. Here, however's, my way of doing things:
7. Once you're satisfied with their placement, take Sarah and do a general cropping of whatever. I loved the overall picture, so I just cropped around her, and then sized it down to 15x15px, taking that picture and pasting it where the other two were. Then, I duplicated it two more times, spreading out the dupes.
8. Next, I duplicated each layer, and set each dupe to 'Screen', at 40%. I'm not putting a picture, because it was only lightened a very small bit, and you can hardly tell at this point.
9. Finally, the coloring. To do whatever everybody seems to do, a dark blue layer, #0A1237, set to 'Exclusion', at 40%. Leave the color over the pictures, but erase it over what shows of the background. (Example's not exclusioned, to show what I mean. Also, one will notice what a dork I was, and how I didn't erase all the blue over the background.) Example:
10. Gradients are fun, so I used one. I can't remember if it was one by 
crumblingwalls, or maybe somebody else, or even if I fiddled around and made my own. Either way, I used the following one, set at 'Multiply', and 100%, and then my result was:
11. Now, I wanted more of a difference between the background, and the pictures, so using one of the colors from the icon BEFORE the gradient, I created a new layer above the background, and filled it in with #CBC9C0, creating this:
12. Brushes! Possibly the most fun things about icons. While not showing the exact brushes I used (since it's actually pretty obvious), the small text brush was inexorablyhere's, and the grainy lines brush was 
subliminalicon's. I created new layers for both, and used plain old white, set both layers on 'soft light', which resulted in this:
13. Granted, it's pretty that way, but needed something. So...text. Text doesn't like me, so I just rotated the entire image 90 degrees and entered 'mclachlan' as the text, using Trixie Plain, size 7. Then, rotated the image back, used Trixie Plain again for 'sarah', size 7, and fiddled with the placement. Merge, and voila!
The icon at the top appears! Hopefully. Maybe. *crosses fingers* I realize it's not the clearest thing ever, but all the fun in icon making, is in the experimenting. Fiddling around and doing your own thing, not just taking other people's ideas and copying them step by step.
Anyway, if you have any questions on this, or maybe I rambled too much, hiding the actual tutorial...just clue me in? I'd rather have everything pointed out at first, than to do another tutorial and then people point stuff out to me, that I did here, but they didn't want to say anything and hurt my feelings. Besides, how else would I learn anything? ;)