Hello! The icon I will be making today is pretty basic. It’s mostly about placement and colouring and such. Nothing complicated at all. Feel free to substitute your own image. I highly recommend that your image has a dark shadow (like mine), to achieve a similar effect. Also, if you don’t have some of the features it’s okay. You can easily get around it in your own program.

If you like my tutorial, and would like to see more made by me, then feel free to request a tutorial by using the contact form in the exits section. Otherwise have fun and don’t forget to credit me!

First of all I went around looking for a nice photograph to work with. I wanted something colorful, but simple at the same time. When I came across THIS image I knew I wanted to use it. I resized the original so that it would fit into my canvas. Then I positioned it so that the letters on the side wouldn’t show. But I also didn’t want any part of her cut off.

Since I scaled down the image, some quality was lost. So I duplicated the layer and sharpened it.

I wanted the icon to be a little bolder and more vibrant. So I duplicated the sharpened layer. Then I equalized the brightness/contrast. Adjust >> Brightness and Contrast >> Histogram Equalize. I set the layer to 52% SOFT LIGHT. It’s not a HUGE difference… but there is a difference. If you’re using your own image make sure you set the soft light low enough so that the contrast isn’t super high! That’s a big NO-NO.

Now that you I have the image prepped, it’s time to spice it up a bit. I browsed through a few of my brushes and decided to use THIS one. I resized the brush varying sizes and painted it in random spots. I didn’t want too many flowers though! Just a little bit to eliminate some of the empty space. I also erased any parts of the flower that was covering the model.

Afterward, I added THIS texture and moved it toward the corner. I wanted it to overlap the flowers, yet not be exactly X amount of px from the left and right edges. Just kind of placed it lazily.

For text I couldn’t think of anything creative so I just wrote a lower case A. I think the font was Time New Roman. But you can achieve the same effect with any Serif font, really. Make sure the option “Create as: Vector” is selected. Once I typed the A I rotated it a little and positioned it at the corner of the text texture.

I didn’t want to over-kill the red. So I wrote in yellow really tiny letters “s”, “i”, “a”, “n” and positioned them randomly around the A. I also rotated them. I made them really subtle so the letters wouldn’t look cluttered.

I still felt like something was missing. I didn’t like how “square” all the edges were with the icon and the texture. In black I typed out a bunch of numbers. I liked how the number 6 looked so I rotated it and place is underneath the text texture.

And voila! I’m finished. Pretty simple. If you have any questions regarding this tutorial feel free to ask me by leaving a comment below. Lastly, don’t forget to credit back! ^_^