Winner's Tutorial, Challenge 77, by turlough

[turlough]

I'm sorry I'm a bit late with this, last week wasn't a very productive week for me I'm afraid.

First of all, thank you everone who voted for me!

This icon was made in Photoshop Elements 6.0 on a Mac and it may involve many steps but it's really very simple so I think it's translatable to just about any program. We will be going from
to

I always use the Rectangular Marquee Tool together with the Crop command to make a roughly square shape of the area I want. I then use both the Marquee Tool+Crop and Resize -> Canvas Size to get it exactly square and finally I resize it to 100x100. This method might involve some backtracking now and then, but it's what works for me.


I started this icon using the same process I've been using to make other icons recently and when I wasn't completely happy with the result of this I added a few things to modify it. The result is a tutorial that isn't only rather long, it also probably includes steps that are completely unnecessary. Be warned.

The first step was to create a Levels layer with the following values:
RGB input levels: 10 1.10 255 output levels: 3 223
Red input levels: 0 0.96 230 output levels: 7 255
Green input levels: 0 1.00 255 output levels: 0 255
Blue input levels: 35 1.00 255 output levels: 0 241
As you can see this makes the colouring much warmer.


I then Copy Merged the base and Level layer into a new base layer, added this coloured texture by spooky_window, flipped it horizontaly and set it to Linear Dodge 100%...
->

...then I copied the merged base two times and dragged both layers on top of the Linear Dodge layer, setting the first one to Multiply 34% and the second one to Screen 49%...


...then I added a bunch of colour layers, a pink one #efbaf7 set to Soft Light 56%, a blue one #93b4f8 set to Color Burn 100%, a green one #00ff00 set to Saturation 17%, a grey one #9c9da3 set to Color Burn 56%, a blue-green one #76c0a7 set to Soft Light 81%, and a yellow one #fff29e set to Multiply 26%...
+ + + + + ->

...and finaly I copied the base layer again, dragging this layer to the top and setting it to Soft Light 54%.


Better than it looked in the beginning but still a bit dull and boring so I decied to add this light texture by esqaire to liven it up a bit, under the top Soft Light layer setting it to Screen 100%...
->

...then I added this colour texture by erniemay to add some more colour, over the top Soft Light layer, rotating it 90° to the left and setting it to Soft Light 100%.
->

Much, much better but the contrasts felt a bit too harsh for me so I added a solid colour layer in brown #3c2204 set to Exclusion 40% to soften it up a bit. Perfect!
->

This is what my layers ended up looking like:


Fell free to ask if there's anything that's unclear or that I forgot.

Also posted on Livejournal here.

Comments

[pensnest]

I love your array of colour fill layers! Very effective.

[turlough]

It's a trick I learned a long time ago, it's very effective for making the "natural" colours of an icon look richer and a bit warmer.