severalplums

This icon was made in PS CS5 (grrr) on a Mac, but is completely translatable.

Due to my habit of procrastination catching up with me (again) I didn't have a lot of time to devote to this challenge, but happily for me this icon came together reasonably quickly.

It's also fairly simple, which is another of my habits, generally. Here's the base.

After cropping and re-sizing, my first thought was to brighten up the colours, so I added a Solid Color layer of 9cb8c6, a greyish light blue, and set this to Color Burn. Very Old School.

I did a Merge Visible layer (Shift+Cmd+alt+E) onto a new layer, and set this to Screen, which gave me a nice cheerful blue. Then, picking out the pink from the flowers, I added a new layer and just painted over the flowers with f72e7d, and set this to Overlay at 59%. It doesn't make a huge difference but I think it brightens the pink a little. Can you actually tell the difference?

Finally, to get a bit more texture into the icon I added this texture by

youthrillme, set to screen.

After poking about a bit, this layer ended up below the pink brushed layer. Save for Web and Devices as .png24, and there you have it—short and sweet.

(PS CS5 has an annoying trick of wanting to save Optimized versions, I don't want that to happen so I go for Original instead. Icons are small enough for it not to matter. I'm not quite used to CS5, and the 'improvements' over CS3 so far do not impress me, hence the grrr up at the top.)

Here's a look at the Layers palette.