![]() Before you finish set it to 100% so you can see exactly what your icon will look like and if you can read the words. There’s a zoom feature in Picmonkey in the right. With text, you can deliberately make it unreadable for effect, but if you want people to actually be able to read it be careful what text you use. Play around with what your software offers. Then you’re off – add text, change colours, blur, add overlays (which are shapes or other images that you can put over the top), whatever you like. I usually sharpen to at least 10, but sometimes I use 8 for a softer touch and I generally use 12 when it’s an image of a person. Picmonkey has ‘sharpen’ and ‘clarify’ options to solve this. Shrinking your image will ‘soften’ it though, or in other words make it blurry or less sharp. On Picmonkey there’s a ‘100x100 avatar’ option under ‘crop’ and you can tick a box to ‘scale photo’ which will shrink down whatever area you chose to crop to the right size proportionally. (Pixels are the little squares that make up an image.) Other sites use different dimensions, so check that. If you’re making icons for Livejournal or Dreamwidth you need to crop the image to 100x100 pixels. For other programmes: upload, open file, save, whatever your poison. For Picmonkey: upload your image using ‘Edit Photo’. You do, however, have to be online for the whole time that you’re using it. It’s free, although if you want special features you now have to pay, and it’s an easy, self-explanatory place. I started out using Picnik, and I now use Picmonkey, which evolved from it. I have GIMP, which you can download for free, although I’m still learning how to use that. ![]() Photoshop is the big one I know of, but it costs and I don’t own it. Pictures and photographs that people have copied or scanned though, I believe those belong to the industry and come under my transformative works rule.įind some software to use. When it comes to crediting, personally I have that graphics resource list and I won’t make icons or graphics from other people’s art, or graphics, or manipulated pictures without their permission and without crediting them. It’s up to your own conscience and morality *shrugs*. That said, even though I use other people’s screencaps I don’t use screencaps of a film or show that I haven’t bought or intend to buy, so the industry doesn’t lose out on money from me. When it comes to copyright issues I treat icon making (and graphics making) like fanfiction in that these are transformative works and no profit is being made. You can find (most of) the places I’ve used for images on my graphic resources list. If you want images from a film or TV show then you’re looking for ‘screencaps’. Remember to make a note of where they’re from or save a link to them so that you can credit and so you can find the place again if you want to use those images again. Remember to have fun!įind images and save them to your computer. Feel free to ask questions, discuss amongst yourselves, and so on. I know there are other and better guides out there. It’s meant to be a rough starting point for people looking into making graphics or joining graphics making communities. This is just how I make my icons, basically tips I’ve picked up and figured out myself as I’ve gone along. I keep meaning to do an icon tutorial, because everyone should be able to play with the pretty pictures, and so here it is!ĭisclaimer thingy: I am by no means technically minded and I don’t use any expensive software.
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