ascendant_angel: (Dalek)
[personal profile] ascendant_angel
This is for[personal profile] skieswideopen who gave me such a nice comment about my use of textures in icons that I decided to write a tutorial.

Today we will be making this: icon.

Start by preparing you base as normal. I like to crop my icon first then brighten using an exposure layer, bump up the saturation and vibrancy,  colour using a colour balance layer then tweak this with a selective colour layer if necessary. Finally  I sharpen my my base by duplicating it running a high pass filter (set low), then setting that to overlay before flattening my base to finish. This is all personal preference there are many ways to prepare a base and they all give similar results. 

My base looks like this:
Now the fun part! Pick a texture,  a good tip is to pick one with colours that match your base image. I chose this one: by [deviantart.com profile] angel_elf_icons  at deviant art because it matched the blue in her outfit, then I flipped it upside down because I wanted the darker part at the bottom.

Next drag your icon base over your texture (or drag your texture over your icon base before moving it down, setting it as a new background) and erase the icon bases background,  resize your image positioning in the middle. I like to work at view size 200% for this bit so I can see clearly but again that's personal preference.

Now my icon looks like this: next I took another texture by[deviantart.com profile] angel_elf_icons  and set it over the top set to screen 100%.

My icon now looks like this: which is nice, but I wanted my background just a little darker so I duplicated the last texture dragged it to just over the first layer (your1st texture) and set it to multiply at 35% opacity.

My icon now looks like this:  its a subtitle effect but looks better especially on the top left hand corner.

Now however the effect on her face is too strong so I take a basic brush set to 0% hardness, and 11% opacity and erase the top texture off her face.

My icon now looks like this: again its a subtle effect. Now you could stop here but I wasn't happy with the colouring I wanted some pink/purple undertones to warm it up a bit. Again there are many ways to do this, I made sure my top layer was selected then went to image adjustments > variations > more red.

Now my icon looks like this: which I was happy with so we're done!

I'm new to tutorials so please let me know what you think, and if anything wasn't clear.



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