post: answers & tutorials

[longerthanwedo.livejournal.com]

 - What are your favorite resources (textures, brushes, fonts, etc)?

          I actually don't use many small, iconsized textures. I only add them when I feel like the icon can use some extra color that isn't present, or if I want it to have a border or a light blob that I can't achieve by using brushes. I do have quite a lot of small textures saved though, and some of my favorites (the ones that I've found myself using multiple times), are midnight_road , innocent_lexys , ina_ami , and ohfreckle .
          The only brushes I ever use are basic, soft round brushes. Maybe I should experiment more in the brush area, but I haven't found anything that I can't do with the round brushes/textures that I have.

          I get all my fonts from dafont.com. Here are just a few of my current favorites:

 

          

          futurist fixed-width

 

          

          big noodle titling

 

          

          nouvelle vague

 

          

          times new roman (bold italic)

 

 

 - What inspires you (music, makers, pictures, etc)?

 

        A mixture of all three, actually. I'll listen to music and jot down lyrics that remind me of a show/scene/ship/character for later iconing reference. If I'm low on that kind of inspiration, I'll go to screencap sites that have a "most viewed" or "random files" button and browse, saving every cap that catches my eye, whether it be because of the composition, if I see a crop opportunity, or if I like the light or the color. There's really no rhyme or reason to it. I just icon the things that make my eyes happy. Sometimes I'll download .zip files of bases, even, if I'm bored, and pick out the ones I like to either combine or icon on their own. There are a lot of makers who inspire me. To name a few, letsey_x  and exp0se  for text, emmahyphenjane , calikalie , and wicked_signs  for coloring, mental_ability  and midnight_road  for textures/composition. I really have a ton of makers that I love.

 

 

 - What are your favorite/go-to tools in your graphics program?

 

         I use Photoshop CS4, and easily my favorite/most used tool is vibrancy. It can be found in the adjustments panel (or image > adjustments > vibrancy). I use it in everything I make, excluding black and white graphics of course. I usually set it to 100% and then adjust the opacity if it's too vibrant. Sometimes I'll increase the saturation as well, but much more subtly. Another of my favorite tools lately are gradient maps. A gradient starting with a darker color and ending in a paler shade set to soft light really adds lovely contrast and color to screencaps. The "reduce noise" filter (filters > noise > reduce noise) is a really, really useful tool that I've only just recently discovered. Its great for taking darker, grainy caps (Supernatural, TVD and Angel, I'm looking at you) and smoothing them out without losing too much detail. It really works wonders, especially on larger graphics.

 

 

 - What are your favorite colors to work with?

 

        Yellows and oranges, definitely. Almost everything you'll find has some sort of yellow in it, and when you use vibrancy/saturation those colors really pop out. Some of my favorite caps to work with are caps that have a green or blue backdrop and a yellow subject/overtone. Lost caps are excellent for me for this reason. I love the way the yellow highlights the blue and green. I also love when caps have a purple/magenta hue that looks wonderful with yellow or orange highlights.

 

 

 - The light blobs! :D They can be so tricky and you use them SO well! How do you decide when and where to place them? Do you use a brush or texture? Basically how do you do it?

          Ah, the light blobs. I absolutely cannot make an icon without adding a light blog or more. I've tried, and I've gotten so used to it that it feels lacking without the highlights. First, I color my icon and flatten the image when I'm all done. Then I duplicate the flattened, colored image and set the duplicate to soft light.

         

         Then I go into a new layer and on top of the other two I paint lines or spots with a soft round white brush with a diameter of 10-15. I determine the placement and direction of the strokes depending on the cap and crop i'm using. Here I  wanted a glow in between Kate and Boone, extending up as far as Boone's head to soften the sharp lines and lighten it up a bit. 

        

        Next I  go to filter  > blur > gaussian blur and adjust the amount of blur until it looks smooth but not overly dissipated. Here I  used a blur of 7.8. Now the white sits on top of the image.

       

       For a final step I  like to integrate the light a little more into the cap, so I move the brush layer underneath the soft light layer. This allows the white to take on some of the original color of the cap and it looks more like a purposeful component of the icon. In this case the white was a little too overtaken by the soft light layer, so I duplicated the brush layer and reduced the opacity to 56%. 

      

      And there's the finished (albeit quick) icon!


 - How to you go about putting together some of your larger graphics? How do you decide which caps to use, how to place them, how to color them, etc?

       I was going to make a separate post for this but then I decided that I have too much time on my hands right now and to just include everything in one post. Have fun scrolling, everyone. So, larger graphics. As different as they can be, I have the same basic process for most of them, so I'll do my best to explain that and give you examples as I go along. As far as what caps I  choose, that varies. Some of my graphics are single caps, colored and with textures and text, and some have multiple caps put together. The single-cap ones are usually made just because I have random caps lying around that I don't know what else to do with. When I make graphics with multiple caps, though, they tend to have a common/uniting theme. Either they're caps from the same scene, or caps of the same character or ship. Very occasionally I'll throw together random caps of a show, but usually that's only when I want to deliberately show all aspects of a show or season or include all characters. 
       The placement again really depends on what I want to achieve with my graphic. With single caps I tend to use a lot of negative space. I'm a huge fan of negative space. Sometimes I'll take two or three caps and blend them together, moving them to the center or bottom of a large canvas. The negative space technique makes adding text easy and effective. Some examples of what you can do with negative space (click on thumbnails for full size):



        I use a blocking technique on most of the graphics that combine multiple caps. For specific scenes or character shots, blocking is a great way to condense the caps and provide a continuity and togetherness to the graphic. The technique is pretty simple for most of these types of graphics. Sometimes I color the caps separately and then paste them into a new blank file, and sometimes I  paste the plain caps (if they all have a similar light/color scheme, or if I  want them all to look uniform). Scale the images in their separate layers to whatever size you like; my sizing varies immensely, sometimes I'll shrink the images until they're very small and I can fit a lot of caps on one graphic, and sometimes I  just take two caps and make them each roughly half the size of the canvas so I can stack them on top of eachother. You can either place them directly side by side, or you can set all your separate layers to lighten and move them so they slightly overlap, which makes them blend nicely. The lighten layers only work if your background is black, however. Examples of graphics with multiple caps:



         My coloring is actually relatively simple. I'll go through it step by step, using a Vampire Diaries cap, because those caps are usually dark and hard to work with, so these steps can be translated at a less intense level to lighter caps. First just crop the image how you like (I  always crop with a width of 500px, because that's the standard Tumblr image size).

 
          
          Obviously this cap needs to be lightened a lot. Duplicate the base layer and set it to screen. Duplicate the screen layer two more times, then again and change the top layer to soft light. Here I also like to mess with the contrast, adding a brightness/contrast layer and setting brightness to +34 and contrast to +42.



        Now it's time for my best friend, the gradient map. This cap is primarily blue, so I chose a gradient beginning with #127286 and ending with #1a9eba. Set the layer to soft light and move it below the brightness/contrast layer. This really brings out the original color in the cap and makes it more intense.



        Of course, I'm addicted to color and even that isn't colorful enough for me, so I  go to my other best friend, vibrancy and saturation. Add a vibrancy layer between the gradient map and the brightness/contrast layers. I  used settings of vibrancy +50 and saturation +17 for this cap. 



        That pretty much takes care of the color. Now I just add some finishing touches. First, flatten the image. Go to filter  > noise > reduce noise and adjust the settings as you see fit. I set the filter to strength 10, preserve details 35%, reduce color noise 0% (reducing color noise also reduces color, which is bad), and sharpen details 0%. This removes a lot of the graininess that comes with dark caps. If you want to remove more, use the blur brush set on around 50% and smooth out the background. This also brings the subject forward. 



        And that concludes my coloring process!
       Another important aspect of my graphics is texture. I don't use much texture when I'm just making icons, but when I'm making larger graphics I absolutely love them. You can find wonderful, interesting large textures on Tumblr (-redux and slayground are my favorite makers) and on LJ as well. Light textures, frame textures, textures with shapes/patterns, and white-on-black grunge textures work best when set to either lighten or screen. These are excellent for borders, embellishments, and overall texturing of the surface of the graphic.



        Darker textures and colorful textures work best on soft light or even overlay or hard light. They add contrast and depth, as well as color and intensity. Usually I'll add these on layers underneath the white textures.



       Really the last thing I  should talk about is text. Text is awesome, and you can use it in pretty much any way you want. I tend to incorporate lyrics into my graphics or quotes from the scene/character being depicted. I usually use big, bold fonts, or handwritten ones if it seems to fit with the mood of the graphic or the lyric/quote. I tend to use mostly white text, or if the background is light, a color that appears int he cap. I  rarely use black text. I just don't find it as visually appealing. After you have your text laid out the way you want it, select all the layers that contain text, right click and select rasterize type. Then right click again and select merge layers. I  always blur my text slightly with a gaussian blur set to 0.3 or so. A few examples of what text can look like:



        I think that pretty much sums up my creative process! I  hope all my answers were satisfactory and made sense. If you're using a program other than CS4, you can probably find alternatives to all these steps if you don't have the exact tools. Thank you guys for the questions, and this was actually really fun, so I'll definitely do it again ♥