icontalking | Re: Maker Thread (Reply)

From:

firstly, thank you for asking so many questions! <3

1) GLOW

Oh god.... I feel like my glow is very hit and miss. I can't even say I'm doing anything in particular. My process for glow is:

- make the brush large and soft, paint a blob in a light color (white is best by far, but sometimes I use a saturated yellow or blue). Make sure the glow is on the correct side, matching the direction of the lighting on the subject
- I sometimes actually leave it on Normal blend mode, but most of the time I set it to Screen or Soft Light.
- smudge it until it doesn't look circular anymore
- erase it from the middle of the subject's head, leaving the edges.
- smudge again (repeat...)

That's it. I smudge it (which makes it softer) until I think the subject looks lit but not washed out. I'm not sure that's a good process - and it doesn't always work. I have lots of examples where I definitely overdid it. This one is too light I think:

2) MINI-TUTORIAL

I don't think I can write a whole tutorial on this icon. I didn't do much. :) I'll sketch it here for you:

- here's the cap:

* you can see that the lighting is already all there in the cap (the Detective L caps are all lit like that, they're a lot of fun to work with)
- I filled the background with a blue color (#375676)
- I added a texture (from the British Library here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/albums/72157638733975756)

- I didn't even change the color of the texture, just set it to Overlay at 69%. (As you can tell from the layer palette, I just added it as is first, and only later decided to make it blue by adding the blue layer and setting the texture above it in Overlay mode.)

- I masked Xiaoman and duplicated her twice:
- The first duplicate, I sharpened and set to 50%.
- The second duplicate I set to Linear Add at 40%.
* The percentages depend on the cap, but that is one of my normal processes for base preparation for dark and slightly blurry caps. Sometimes I mask the sharpened layer, too, but I didn't do that here.
- I painted a yellow blob (#f0bf74, taken from her face after the whole lighting process) in the right half of the icon and moved it behind her and set it to Color 100%.
* I did this because wanted the background colors to fit the original lighting of the original cap, and now we have blue on the left and yellow on the right. (But I hated how that yellow came out... it's too muddy and greenish.)

- I painted a white blob into the upper left corner and set it to Soft Light (100%)
- I painted another smaller blob in the same corner and set it to Soft Light (100%)
- I duplicated that smaller blob
* this is why the glow is soft but still strong in the corner

That's it. Here's the layer palette:

I was very unsure about this and hated that the yellow didn't come out yellow enough for my taste. So I made seven alts (of which I posted four):

3) TEXTURES

In that particular icon, I actually didn't do *anything*. I just chose a texture that matched in color to the cap. But usually they don't.

a) Imho, the main thing with fake background is accurate masking. Which is why I mask at full size these days. I use the magnetic lasso to mask the subject and then quick mask to fix what the lasso got wrong. Only then do I resize to 100x100. (I like to work at 100x100.) That gives me crips edges. If I want to put a texture in front of the subject, I do the same: mask it crisply, so the styles match.

b) Coloring: I usually add a plain color layer in a color picked from the texture or from the subject and set that to Lighten at low opacity. This will give the icon a consistent look. That's my way of making the coloring match. Doesn't work with all the caps or all the textures, so I usually keep changing the texture until one fits.

c) Background-Foreground: the only type of texture I can do this thing in a way that I like the results are flower textures. They're easy because flowers have a nice round form behind which to place the subject. I have tried with other textures, but only rarely. Examples: