#morrisonjennifer

First step, pick the screencap/pic. I’m gonna go with this:

I’ll crop it, position it and resize it. The dimensions I use when I’m working on my icons is 400x400 but that’s up to you. It looks now like this

My next step is to add the background colour. I add a new layer and start to paint on it using the brush tool (hardness should be at 100%). This is one of the parts that requieres the most pacience IMO. I normally just paint this amount

Then I zoom in (400% usually) to paint around the silhouette, like this

Once I painted around the silhouette (and in this case filled the tiny spaces there were between Emma and Killian), it looks like this

And now the only thing left to have the bg ready is to fill the spaces left on the layer,

Next, I add my PSD below the BG layer and I have this

Every time, I like to change the colour of the clothes, and play a little with the hair colours. For that, I go to the PSD, add a new layer and go here

and change it to “color”. I pick the brush tool again, and start to paint (I like to add one layer for the clothes, and another for the hair). More often than not, I don’t quite like how the colour I picked for each thing looks like, so I play around with the selective color. After I’m done I have this

I’m almost done, now the only thing left is the background effect. There are two things I like to do:

1) I go to  layer > new fill layer > gradient and this pops up

I leave the settings as they are and this appears

Clicking on the gradient box I have this window now

I go to the tiny pink boxes

and change the colour of both of them to white. After pressing OK I’m back to the first box and where it says “linear”

 I change it to “radial” and now it looks like this

But since their faces are covered I select the mask next to the gradient

select the brush tool making sure the colour of the brush is black, and start to paint on them to get rid of the white, and this is the result

2) For this effect is the same layer > new fill layer > gradient process but when this pops up 

I change “normal” to “soft light”. I click the gradient box

and select the black and white square

now the icon will look like this

But one of these layers is usually not enough for me, so I duplicate the gradient layer and click here (on the copy)

so when the gradient window pops up I go here 

and in this case make the angle 180°, but I usually change. So the icon looks now like this 

The only left thing to do is change the dimensions of it (I often go with 100x100 or 160x160), add some sharpening and my icons are ready