severalplums

This icon was made in PS CS3 on a Mac. It uses a couple of filters, which may not be exactly translatable.

This challenge proved to be a lot harder than I expected! Really, there's quite an art to choosing pictures for an icontest, and I'm still very hit and miss. Ah well, it is supposed to be a *challenge*.

So, here's the base crop I chose.

I duplicated this twice, set the first layer to Color Burn and the second to Screen, but masked off the very bottom of the Screen layer, where the table is, and also the interior of the cup and a little of the dark brown by the left side of the cup, as I wanted them to stay dark.

Did a 'merge visible' layer, as it now looks like this:

Then it was fun with filters time, and eventually I settled on Filter>Artistic>Paint Daubs, using the program's default settings. And I masked off the lower part of the icon so as to keep the cup and orange segment in their natural state.

I duplicated this layer (the mask came along for the ride), and gave it a Gaussian Blur of 8.2, and set this layer to Screen to give it that hazy look and soften the effect of the Paint Daubs filter a little.

Being pleased with the result, there it stayed. Saved for Web and Devices as a .png 24.

The Layers palette: