#icon tutorials

STEP 1

Make sure your canvas is ready! Since Tumblr’s icon size is 128 x 128, I like to use a square canvas and make it 500 x 500 because it’s easier to move and change things. You can always resize before you save it! 

STEP 2

For this icon, I will start with a circle! This will help us transform the icon into something cool! You should end up with something like this.

STEP 3

Now, select the layer that we have. 

Then, go to Edit > Transform Path > Warp 

You should end up with something like this

STEP 4

This step is a free for all, because it’s honestly whatever you want to do! Just play around with it, pull in or pull out. For the sake of this example, there’s two things I’ll be trying out, and I’ll put the download links to them as well, in case you’re interested in trying! 

And then I realised that I forked something up, so with the circle thing, we’re going to try and replicate a paint blob! 

And now I’m going to make it artsy fartsy! 

And if you’d like to download this template for yourself, here’s the link! (MF)

Now, if you repeat step 3 with a different shape, you can achieve different results, like I did here with a Rounded Rectangle! 

Again, if you’d like this one for yourself, here’s the link! (MF)

STEP 5

Now to the pictures into the icon! I’m going back to the first one we were working with, and again, grab your fancy pngs! This time, we’ll use this picture of Sydney Sweeney, aka another love of my life!

So if you follow the same steps in the previous tutorial, you’ll end up with something like this

Now the next step is optional, but I like to add pngs, so the ones I used are here and here! Add them as you see fit, and this is what mine turned out like! 

Again, this is really your own spin on things, and have fun trying to pay around with them and see what floats your boat! 

STEP 6

Save like so! Make sure to resize it to 128 x 128! 

and here’s our end result!

I start with picking out a screenshot to use (I got this one here). Try to choose a screenshot where you can see the top of the person’s head, both shoulders, and some of their torso. In this pic of Harley, I’m going to edit her bat and hand out, so it’s just going to be her torso. 

Movies/TV shows are often stupidly dark and sometimes icons just don’t work out in certain scenes. So here I just lightened up the image and adjusted the contrast and colour balance to make sure it will look alright once I’ve edited it some more.

Begin by ‘smart selecting’ your person. You basically just draw around them and extend the selected area until she’s highlighted (if you go too far, it’s alt + click to go make select inwards).

Once selected, I go to Select > Refine edge:

I tend to smooth and contrast my picture before I cut it and paste it into my icon file. Here’s what it looks like for this one:

Once I hit ‘okay’, I then cut that layer and paste it to my icon document, which is set at 200px x 200px (don’t worry, the edges are going to look sloppy). You can also go to the ‘output to’ drop down menu and select your desired location. You can also do 100x100px, but I like mine to be a bit larger so people can use them in sidebars:

I then resize the image for the icon. I tend to have my screenshot sit over just half of the icon (I also tend to sharpen the icon here, too. If the sharpen selection is too drastic, go to ‘smart sharpen’ and adjust accordingly):

From there, I play with the levels, colour balance, contrast, brightness, etc. It’s different for each picture, but I try to make it as contrasted as I can without it looking too dark and too bright without it being washed out. I tend to just adjust the levels for POC to avoid white washing, but there are loads of tutorials on how to do that correctly, but make sure you add a vibrance layer. So here’s what my adjusted image looks like:

After I adjust the contrast, I clean up the edges with an eraser tool:

This is where it can be slightly unconventional. After that, I draw on my own hair to make it look more “natural” with less clean lines. Totally optional though.

After I have my hair, I always make a new layer where I try and even up the colours a bit. So here I’m going to the colour dropper tool and highlight the most saturated areas of her hair:

With both colours, I draw over them on a new layer and select that layer to the ‘colour’ option (with normal hair, you won’t be able to pick a colour like this, so if it’s brown hair, for instance, I’d pick a dark but vibrant brown to do this process with):

It then looks like this (there’s not much of a difference here but it evens up the tones and I find that it just makes the image look cleaner and a bit more saturated in a lot of cases without over-saturating the face/clothing):

The next step is to smooth out the skin. One of the problems with so many colour/brightness/sharpening adjustments is that it can be a bit pixelated now that it’s at 200x200px. So I take the smudge tool and set it to a round brush at 2 or 3px and at 4%, and just smooth over the skin (not touching the eyes, jawline, nose or lips). So if you do do this, just be careful not to smudge the face:

After that, I try to even up the skin tone again, sort of like what I did to the hair. I colour drop an area of skin and make a new layer to colour roughly over the face. I change the layer to ‘soft light’ and change the opacity to ~30%:

So the skin tone is a bit more consistent and it gets rid of shadows a bit:

From there, I add a colour/gradient in the background.

I like my clothing to match the background, so I make a new layer, colour drop the most saturated area of the background, and draw over the clothes. I then I set that layer to ‘colour’.

You can choose what you want to colour/not colour, but once you change the layer style, it should look roughly like this:

I also like to have textures. So I use the colour from the gradient to make a new layer (layer 59 in this pic -- you won’t have as many layers, I like to merge a lot of mine together, but this is in my super big icon psd where I have all of my favourite textures and gradients saved). I fill the layer with the fill tool and I set the new layer to ‘colour’ and place it above the texture I want.

And then the final product should look like this! 

I do ~5 textures per colour (it’s super easy to find textures, just google them). I save a lot of the ones I use to my resource blog, @chewsbacca

If I want to change colours, I change the colour of the clothing and the ‘colour’ layer over: (so I change the blue fill layer to pink and make sure that it’s still set to ‘colour)

(so I changed the background colour and then you can see that I coloured over the clothing to match the background and then did some textures.)

It seems like there’s a lot here, but the whole process (say 30 icons in total) probably takes me about 15 minutes. I’m sorry this is like a half-assed tutorial and I’m probably terrible with explaining things, but at least you guys might know my process a bit more!

english is not my first language so if there are any mistake i’m sorry about that.

for the first step we will start with creating a new layer with a transparent background with the size 250x250 if you don’t know how to make one go to the file -> new

here is how it should look a like ! after that we will need to make the square where our png will go.  go to the marquee tool, right-click on it and select the rectangular marquee tool, here are my settings :

after doing this go on the layer you made at the beginningand make the selection on it. now we need to fill the selection so right-click on it and select fill. now we want the square to be in the middle so press ctrl+a and go to the move tool and use these things to put the square in the middle of the layer :

the square should look like this :

i used green as the color of my square so it would fit with my png ! now you will need the png of the picture you want to use after coloring it merge visible the layers and put the png into layer with the square it should look like this :

now that we have the png put in there we should delete the bottom part so go back to the marquee tooland change your style from fixed size to normal, select the bottom part of the png and press delete ! here is my final result :

okay so I use photoshop for my editing 

once you have your image all set up your document should look something like this:

first I use the paint bucket tool to fill in the background behind Daisy:

and behind the paint bucket tool is the gradient tool which is the main point of the tutorial (the keyboard shortcut is G):

the key to this tutorial is to use layers, I find that my gradients always look better when I have each step on a different layer:

I typically end up using three layers, one for the highlight, one for the color, and the third for the main background:

on the very bottom layer underneath daisy I use the paint bucket tool and from  the swatches pick out a nice shade of blue:

your document should look something like this:

now I do the highlight, to find the highlight for the icon I look at the character and with the white swatch and the gradient tool I recreate where the light is coming from on the layer above the background:

then I go and do something similar on the layer above that with a different color to get that gradient look:

feel free to experiment with colors! this is the main reason why I put the gradients on seperate layers so that I can experiment with color combinations 

blue and a dark pink:

yellow and that same dark pink

purple and green

okay now comes the coloring part

I always just do a new adjustment layer and play around with things until it looks good, I really wish I could add specifically what works best but I found that for the best icons to just make a new PSD for every single one

be sure to click on that small arrow in the properties box so that you are editing the picture to go with the gradient and not the whole canvas the arrow is pointing down to indicate you are only working on that one particular layer

Daisy looks much better now!

now I select parts of her clothes to do some additional coloring fun;

I chose to do her shirt underneath the vest and using a new adjustment layer I did color balance and now I just slide around  the bars till it looks good

then experiment with different colors and different gradients

finally, I just find a white texture (usually on google images) and I open it to the document and put it above all the gradient layers but underneath the character layer and change the mode to color burn

and that leaves you with:

now for a 3D profile photo you just need to crop your original photo into the shape of your desire then go to image > image size and adjust the size to 100. then go to image > canvas size and make it at least 130, (i do 140). after that right-click your image layer and go to blending options and select drop shadow. below are my settings but you can play around with it to your liking.

and you can also add bevel & emboss if you want.