Activity #84 - Ask The Maker

[tinny]

this banner features an icon by bold_seer

Several people have already asked me if there's going to be an Ask The Maker activity again this year, and here it is!

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).

I 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/887569.png" alt="Ask The Maker 2024"/> <user name="icontalking"> <a href="https://icontalking.dreamwidth.org/84908.html">Go Here</a> Ask The Maker is where you can ask for advice on iconmaking. You can ask for tutorials, guides/"How to", or ask any other technical questions. </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 until the end of July.

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 activity result post in early August. 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 activity result post at the end of the month.



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 or your dw account) 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 to picking textures (from our 2019 round) by seraphina_snape
#3 - Guide to composition (from our 2023 round) by aurora_amethyst

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.

Trippy Tutorial by tinebrella
Tutorial (from 2020) by abyss_valkyrie
Tutorial by tinyumbrella

Tutorials are the most-often requested thing here, feel free to check our tag from previous rounds:
https://icontalking.dreamwidth.org/tag/ask+the+maker,activity+result?mode=and

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


Maker thread

Questions thread


This activity will run approximately until the end of July, maybe mid-August.

Comments

Questions Thread

[tinny]

Ask questions for the community here

Re: Questions Thread

[kissed]

Hello! So with certain icons I've seen or even just in general, they do this effect that makes the icon's focal point pop and I was wondering as to what exactly this technique is and if at all possible, a guide on how to do it. Usually it's used with solid backgrounds or you can tell it's used icons in general like the examples below with varying degrees (for these examples they're all concentrated in the middle):



It could be something simple (hopefully) but I'm pretty new to PS techniques, so any help would be appreciated~ Thank you!

Re: Questions Thread

[tinny]

When I do this, I make a new layer, paint into it with a soft large white brush, and set the layer to Soft Light.

You can also set it to Screen at a low opacity, but that will make the colors lighter/more washed out, whereas Soft Light keeps the colors more intact somehow? (I don't exactly understand what Soft Light does, tbh.)

Feel free to try this out and let me know if it was what you were looking for?

Re: Questions Thread

[kissed]

Thank you for the help and the steps! It definitely sounds like what I'm looking for, so I'll try it out next time and report back! 💀

Re: Questions Thread

[goodbyebird]

That's a blob of a light color/white, set to soft light. Usually nestled within the other layers of the icon, so it adds light but doesn't wash out the colors. It's a great way to create some movement in an icon, or highlight things you want to bring attention to.

This old tutorial by letsey_x covers the use of light blobs.

Re: Questions Thread

[kissed]

THANK YOU! It's nice to finally have a name for this technique. And thank you for linking a guide as well! 🤍

Re: Questions Thread

[goodbyebird]

yw! It's a fairly beloved trick of the community :)

comics tutorials

[tinny]

I kind of by accident mentioned at queermedia_ic that I have little to no experience with iconing comics sources, and goodbyebird very helpfully linked three tutorials written by them and by liesmiths here:

https://queermedia-ic.dreamwidth.org/10628.html

the tutorials are for these icons:

Re: comics tutorials

[abyss_valkyrie]

Thank you!Comic colouring is hard,haha!

Re: comics tutorials

[littlemissnovella]

This is so helpful! I find comics/anime are harder to edit, imo!

Re: Questions Thread

[scifirenegade]

Wanted to know, is anyone familiar with making icons using black and white source materials (like older films)? How do you handle cropping and resizing screencaps? Any neat techniques you're willing to share?

I understand this is a bit too general, but it's hard to find someone who does guides and tutorials that focus on b&w source material icons :')

Re: Questions Thread

[tinny]

I'm exactly the wrong person to ask for b&w /o\, so I haven't checked out these tutorials myself.

Here's my list of icon tutorial memories (isn't lj's way of showing memories great? i wish dw had that) :

https://tinnny.livejournal.com/memories/?ukw=icon%20tutorials%20(by%20other%20people)&skw=all&security=all&sortby=memid

most of the ones I found in the list aren't about b&w caps and/or are broken now, but here's one that goes into detail about what to look for in a cap when you want to make b&w icons:

Black and White guide by absolutelybatty

and here's a list of b&w-related tutorials, but I didn't check if any of them still work or are based on b&w caps:

https://icon-tutorial.livejournal.com/8706910.html

Basically, your best bet for icon tutorials is still to browse old lj icon tutorial comms/lists.

Re: Questions Thread

[scifirenegade]

Thank you very much. In that icon-tutorial comm there was a very nice one with James Dean, thought it very nice. So this has been certainly helpful ^^

Re: Questions Thread

[abyss_valkyrie]

Choosing blu ray scans are the best trick I'd say. Old films have a grainy quality & when resized gets blurry. If not available,I can try to deal with it this way.
Resize.
Use sharpening or sharpen edges option.
Then magnify the picture & use the blur brush to blur the grainy skin texture. I'll try to make a graphic post about how to do this right away since it's pretty straightforward. :D

Re: Questions Thread

[scifirenegade]

Thank you so much for the trick!