Icon tutorial




So, it was asked of me how I made the color effects here. So I thought what better way to answer than to make a tutorial.



Below is a step-by-step guide on how, it's really easy to do, whether you have photoshop or paintshop pro. These were made in the latter but you could pretty much get the same look from both.

This icon is fairly basic for examples sake, but in the link I gave you there are peaces made the same way:




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Ok, so first things first, find a picture you like, crop it in the most interesting way you can, resize it to 100 x 100 pix and lightly sharpen. Adjust the saturation to 0 or make greyscale, and add a layer using the light browny color in box two below. Make it so that this layer is set on 'color' on your layer blend mode at a very low opacity, this was at 10. Adjust to your own liking.

Now box four is simply a cropped image of an old photo I had lying around where my finger was over the lense, these photos may be a pain but they can be simply wonderful for creating texture in graphics. So you may use that texture or one of your own and make it so that its blend mode is on 'screen'.

Your icon should look something like box six right now. Ok now add a new layer using the color in box six and set it to 'lighten' on your blend mode so that it now looks something like box seven. Now here I would adjust saturation, make it darker or lighter, but for this example I've added just a little of the brown beige we used before in box two, but this time when I placed the layer on my image I set it to about 15 % multiply. I gave the icon a little white/grey frame and voila, done!

Yep, that's about it. Just play around and have fun. Feel free to ask any questions and I'll be sure to get back to you.

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