Activity #26 - Ask The Maker

[tinny]

this banner is featuring an icon by tinyumbrella

It's June, and that means it's time for Ask The Maker again!

Our poll decided that a good majority of our makers here would like to see this activity again, and I'm hoping for high participation.

Ask The Maker is where you can ask your favorite makers about how they do that thing. You can ask for tutorials, guides/"How to", or ask any other questions related to their work. Check out the Maker thread (below) for makers who have signed up and are ready to answer your questions.

You can also ask questions to the community at large, and hope that someone is able to answer them. Do this in the Questions thread (below).

By now this community has been active for over two years, and we've grown quite a bit, along with DW. This should make for an interesting mix. I for one am looking forward to interesting questions and discussions!

Please promote this activity!

You can use this code here:
<center><img src='https://tinny.dreamwidth.org/file/205196.png' title='Activity #26 - Ask The Maker 2019' alt='Activity #26 - Ask The Maker 2019' /> <user name="icontalking"> <a href="https://icontalking.dreamwidth.org/34730.html">Activity Post</a> </center>

The more participants the merrier! I will promote it at an official promo comm.

Here are the rules:

1) Maker-Driven


Rules for makers who want to sign up

Sign up by commenting to the Maker thread.

Please don't sign up if you know that you can't or do not plan to fulfill the requests you get within a month.

If you are an icon maker and you're willing to write tutorials, guides or answer questions (Q&A's), please sign up here with your name and where you post your work. Please state what you're willing to do/answer and if people can hotlink your work or not. Use this posting template:

<b>Username + where you post your work:</b> <b>What can we request from you (tutorials, Q&A, guides etc.)</b> --->(If you know of anything that you're not able to answer/do, please mention it)<--- <b>Can we hotlink your icons?:</b>

There is no fixed time limit in which the signed up makers have to write these tutorials or answer questions, but it would be nice if everyone managed to post their answers within the next month. I will make the master list post around mid-July (i.e. in six weeks). Even if you take longer than that, please try and answer your questions. Please let people know if you find out you cannot fulfill the requests. Try not to leave people hanging.

All tutorials/Q&A etc. need to be posted in your community/journal and be posted publicly. In-depth explanations on tutorials is not a must, but highly encouraged.

When you finish your requests, post a link to them as a reply to the original request comment here. That way, I and the person requesting will be able to see them and I can add them to the master list.



2) Question-Driven - I have a question and anyone can answer



If you have a question about techniques, a specific look, etc, but you can't ask any maker directly (e.g. because they didn't sign up or are not on DW or because your question is more of the general kind), you may ask your question in the Questions thread.

Be aware that there is no guarantee that you'll get your question answered. You will increase your chances by asking specific questions about specific techniques and by giving icon examples, from different makers if possible. Please don't ask about single specific icons, nobody should feel pressured into participating.

Please don't hotlink icons from other makers without asking them. Reupload the icons (e.g. to imgur.com or postimages.com) instead.



What's What


Question categories and examples

Guides - a guide is a general explanation post. The maker will make a post explaining how to achieve a particular effect, use a technique, use a tool, etc.

#1 - Text and typography in gimp by cool_spectrum
#2 - A guide lighten dark bases from last year by tinny

Tutorial - a tutorial is a step-by-step description of how to make a particular icon. Only the maker of an icon can make a tutorial of how they made that icon. If you ask for a tutorial, you must provide said icon with your question. This kind of question only makes sense in the Maker thread.

A tutorial by fueschgast
Example tutorial #2 by word_never_said

Q&A - everything that doesn't quite fit the first two categories. Ask away, hope for the best. :)


Maker thread

Questions thread

Comments

Re: Maker Thread

[sheliak]

Username + where you post your work: Sheliak + https://sheliak.dreamwidth.org/tag/icons
What can we request from you (tutorials, Q&A, guides etc.) I'm up for anything!
Can we hotlink your icons?: Sure.

Re: Maker Thread

[tinyumbrella]

I always struggle to make comic book icons look normal, do you have any tips and tricks for colouring? I like your colouring on these:

Re: Maker Thread

[sheliak]

I think that first one was just a crop from a page, unaltered. (So the answer for that one is “start with a scan with coloring you like, and don’t mess with it.” Probably kind of disappointing? Although it might be worth mentioning that comic book coloring has changed a lot over time; I work mostly with older comics, stuff from the 80s and modern digitizations of it, and the colors there tend to be a lot flatter than stuff from the last two decades or so.)

The second one is pretty similar, just with a texture for a background.

The basic thought process on most of my icons like that is:
- Pick a scan you like the coloring on.
- If you’re using a texture as a background, match it to the coloring and quality of the scan. (If the scan is an old, faded comic, especially one that uses halftone/dotted coloring, you want to use faded/papery textures rather than the kind of bright/smooth texture I used for the second Corsair above.) I can pull up some examples if that’d be useful?
- Upping contrast can help a lot with faded scans, although you have to be careful not to overdo it. If you do this, fiddling with the brightness as well is usually a good idea.

The third one is where it gets a bit fancier. I didn’t save the .xcf file (if you like I can try reverse engineering the icon to be more sure of the steps?), but this is approximately what I did, starting from the cropped panel and working in GIMP:
1. Used Free Select to get a layer of just the character I wanted, erased the background edges.
2. Copied just the glasses for a second layer (and erased around them in that layer).
3. Went to the character layer and used the Colorify tool to convert it to grayscale. (NB: I might’ve first copied the layer again, and used color to alpha to get just the linework and layer that on top of the grayscale. I don’t think I did that in this case, but I did it in some of that batch.)
4. Added a texture as a background.
5. …. Saved. I thought I was done at this point. Then I noticed that the background was a bit too orange, so I went back and upped the contrast a bit so that it’s redder. This had the effect of also losing some of the grayscale effect on the character, though there’s still some gray in his jacket. The first version of the icon is here: https://i.imgur.com/Bmy0fOF.png

I hope that was of some use! And if you've got any follow-up questions I'll do my best to answer them.

Re: Maker Thread

[tinyumbrella]

No that's really cool, i like your idea of having different layers and modifying the colouring!!

thanks :)