More icons

[vilakins]

The last of them, I think. I made these are for quarryquest who wanted the carnivorous plants from Saurian Major. She has a choice of two--a single plant, and three of them with Avon and Vila. quarryquest, I haven't added any text so let me know if you want any. These were hard to do, what with the pictures being so monochrome, so I took some liberties with the colour. And hey, comics aren't supposed to be realistic! Amyway, let me know which one you take. :-)

Comments

[trixieleitz]

Have been meaning to say, that is a neat effect - how do you do it? Is it similar to how I did my Inara icon, with added colour?

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Actually it's a lot easier, I found. I'll have to have another go at that. How do you get your marbled background effect? I love your icon--it's just beautiful and very elegant.

Anyway, the tutorial is here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/not_a_painter/5352.html). If I could adapt your Gimp tutorial to PSE2, I'm sure you can. Basically I improve the contrast and lighting, apply poster edges, set the threshold levels till it looks workable, do some cleaning up and freehand drawing of missing lines, add two now layers and move the first one to the top, delete the white, colour in the next layer down, then add an effect or colour graduation to the bottom layer.

I was going to add some cartoons to my site and I think I'll use this method to create them--when I get the time.

[trixieleitz]

That looks like a useful tute - thanks!

I did the marbled effect thus:
Create a new layer;
Render solid noise (In Gimp, [rightclick]/Filters/Render/Clouds/Solid Noise);
Adjust layer opacity until you like the effect. I used about 20%.

I hope you can re-create that in PSE - I don't know what filters it comes with! I did something similar to your chocolate icon, and to altariel1's Garak "make an end" icon.
Another thing I like to do is make the new layer larger than the image. Then you can move the texture around if it's too dark over a key part of the image, or if you want a light patch to highlight something.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Cool, thanks! I wondered if it was clouds. I'll have to have a proper play sometime. I did a test one but I don't think I chose a good pic.

[redstarrobot.livejournal.com]

It is, but I found that the "posterize edges" step in the Photoshop tutorial is a real bitch to replicate in Gimp...

[trixieleitz]

Does it go anything like this? That's how I made my default icon.