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severalplumsThank you for the votes, everyone—though I wonder if I insinuated myself into first place by avoiding the challenge of the snowboarder! Still, I did manage to do some different things this time, so I hope this tutorial will be of interest. Icon was made in PS CS5 on a Mac, and uses a couple of filters as well as standard things.
Here's the base.
The first thing was to add a Black/White Gradient Map, and then adjust the Levels a little to increase the contrasts—this mostly meant bringing the RH pointer quite a long way towards the middle, to brighten the whites.
I did a merge visible and set this layer to Overlay, then turned off the GM and Levels layers and did another Merge Visible layer.
I copied this new merged layer, and applied an Emboss filter (Filter>Stylize>Emboss) using the program defaults. Which looks like this.
With the Embossed layer set to hard light, it looks more like a painting, which I liked.
To lighten the whole thing I used this texture bydavid_lucena, set to Soft Light, which lightens it up nicely.
Then I had a bit of fun with some snowflake brushes. I'm afraid I can't remember whether these came from an LJ resource maker or from one of my Photoshop Creative disks, but it's not too hard to find snowflake brushes. I put the big snowflake on in a very pale blue, duplicated the layer and Gaussian Blurred it (7.2) and set the lower layer to Hard Light and the blurred layer above it to Screen, then added a couple of smaller snowflakes in a simple layer set to Screen.
The merged visible layer now looks like this:
I duplicated this layer and added a filter, this time Filter>Artistic>Film Grain, again using the program's defaults, setting this layer to Hard Light, and decided I was quite pleased with the result.
Layers Palette:
Here's the base.
The first thing was to add a Black/White Gradient Map, and then adjust the Levels a little to increase the contrasts—this mostly meant bringing the RH pointer quite a long way towards the middle, to brighten the whites.
I did a merge visible and set this layer to Overlay, then turned off the GM and Levels layers and did another Merge Visible layer.
I copied this new merged layer, and applied an Emboss filter (Filter>Stylize>Emboss) using the program defaults. Which looks like this.
With the Embossed layer set to hard light, it looks more like a painting, which I liked.
To lighten the whole thing I used this texture by
david_lucena, set to Soft Light, which lightens it up nicely. Then I had a bit of fun with some snowflake brushes. I'm afraid I can't remember whether these came from an LJ resource maker or from one of my Photoshop Creative disks, but it's not too hard to find snowflake brushes. I put the big snowflake on in a very pale blue, duplicated the layer and Gaussian Blurred it (7.2) and set the lower layer to Hard Light and the blurred layer above it to Screen, then added a couple of smaller snowflakes in a simple layer set to Screen.
The merged visible layer now looks like this:
I duplicated this layer and added a filter, this time Filter>Artistic>Film Grain, again using the program's defaults, setting this layer to Hard Light, and decided I was quite pleased with the result.
Layers Palette: