Full Icon Tutorial: Kate Moennig

Today, we're going to make this pretty thing:

Pretty, ain't it?

I started with a very yummy Kate picture I found online. I cropped it and resized it:

I thought that it lost all of it's sharpness. I tried to sharpen it directly, but it became too much. So, I duplicated the layer and sharpened a lot the top layer (Adjust > Sharpness > Sharpen More). I set the layer on normal 65% opacity and then, I merged them into one layer.

Now, I love gradients, and the layer style Lighten, Screen, Overlay and Saturation Legacy. What I did was make a new raster layer on top of the image one, and flood filled it with a gradient called Fire Pink, which I found at Nanson's place, on the second page.

I set the layer on screen, and ended up with this:

For some reason, I decided the add a gradient. Later on, I noticed that it gave a bit more color and contrast, so I kept it. I made a new raster layer on top of the Fire Pink one, and flood filled it with a black to light pink gradient. Remember, the black must be on the bottom right corner in this case.

I set the layer on screen and this is how it looks:

The difference doesn't really show up until later, the coloring will be better this way, trust me.

Now, you duplicate the image layer and place it over the other two layers, and then, you set it on Saturation Legacy.

You have your nice little image now. All you need is text.

I looked at the image, and, the thing that struck me is how beautiful Kate is in this pic. So, of course, I chose the words true beauty. I used Century Gothic, made the beauty bold.

Now, it still looked kinda bare to me, so I decided to add some words. I had ten thousand song lyrics pop into my head, but I decided to go with simplicity, and I grabbed the definition of beauty from dictionary.com, which was:

1. The quality that gives pleasure to the mind or senses and is associated with such properties as harmony of form or color, excellence of artistry, truthfulness, and originality.

I added it in, using Century Gothic at 3 and making it somewhat centered. I decided that it looked too dark in contrast to the whole feeling of the icon, so I chose to lighten it up a bit by setting the vector layer the text was on to overlay. And, there ya have it.

Feel free to comment and request any other tutorial. Also, duh, don't make exactly the same icon. And, don't snag this icon/tutorial as your own and tell people you made it. Thanks, and if you used this tutorial, feel free to show me what you made with it. Enjoy!