Alright, guys. I'm tired of going to icon_tutorial and seeing lame tutorials and lame answers that tell you what to do without telling you why you're doing it or explaining how it might vary from icon to icon and image to image. Most of the good tutorials for basic skills that I used four years ago are long since gone. Most of the new tutorials for basic skills that I see are overly specific, for instance geared to screencaps from one show but difficult to use for others with wildly different color palettes (e.g., compare Supernatural caps to Veronica Mars caps) or just describing one thing in detail and skimming over everything else, which makes it hard for beginners to make anything that's truly decent. I've seen no end of icons in which there are intermediate/advanced techniques being used but which utterly fail because the crop is boring, the image quality is dodgy, or they don't know how to anti-alias text.

So I was thinking I should make one. My aim would be for this tutorial to be the most extensive guide to iconmaking on LJ (that I've seen, at any rate), taking you through the process of selecting an image and coming up with an idea all the way to posting and advertising your icons (if that's what you choose to do), so that it could be basically a huge crash-course on the icon-making process itself rather than just how to produce a specific look or effect. If this tutorial gets written like how it is in my head, by the end of it you should know your program and tools well enough to be able to make nice-looking icons in any style you want (with a little bit of effort, of course).

I only have Photoshop, but I figure most things are pretty easily translatable (I mean, I've never run into a PSP or GIMP tutorial that I couldn't translate to photoshop, but it's worth mentioning here that I have enough icon-making chutzpah to just mess with different tools until I come up with something that's close, even if I have to effing hand-draw things on the icon) and also that when I finish there might be some experienced PSP or GIMP users willing to go through it and translate any words/sections where there are differences and add any sections if their programs can do nifty things that don't have any PS correlation (and then I'd have to go see how you'd do that in PS, just so no one feels left out). And then they can post the whole goddamn thing at their journals too with the images hosted somewhere different so that it's archived in multiple places.

But anyway. I was thinking of what sections should be included, and this is what I came up with:

- selecting an image and coming up with a general idea
- cropping the image and prepping your base
- color adjustment (this is why I would also need PSP and GIMP users: I'm pretty sure there are selective color alternatives in your programs because I've seen similar things in tutorials, but I have no idea what they are or how they work and most users don't seem to know either)
- text
- decorative effects
- texture use
- blending
- the importance of fiddling with things and pushing buttons even if you don't know what they do (if you press the wrong thing in PS, you will NOT, I repeat, NOT start a nuclear holocaust. in fact, unless you then accidentally save everything to one layer [in which case you're a moron anyway], the effects are reversible. didn't like it? try again)
- finding your own style (and the etiquette of closely emulating someone else's)
- MAYBE: posting and advertising your icons
- MAYBE: dealing with commenting, crediting, and icon thieves (my advice in short: dude. it's the internet. you're not making any money. chill. unless you have limited bandwidth and they're hotlinking... in which case you should tear them apart).

There was a very specific series of events which brought this all on:

1. shadowserenity's Icon Redux Meme, which lead me to the realization that my iconmaking skills have sort of stalled over the past year and that while my style may very a bit, the actual quality of my icons has not gone up.

2. The previous made me want to find good icon tutorials from people who I think have icons far better than my own. I looked and looked and looked. And the only one which fit at all was iconofilth's latest tutorial. Except ... when I did it, it was still the same old "this is what I did" thing and not "this is what I did... and why I did it, and how I'd do it given some different circumstances," which was what I wanted. I mean, my icon looked good (I thought) but it wasn't exactly my style and I didn't really learn anything new (the pattern thing = too complicated. why not just duplicated your icon a couple times and "randomly" mask parts out?). On the other hand, someone -- I don't remember who, sorry -- who had a tutorial for a weird goldish Baltar icon used a white-black gradient map to relieve dark shadows, and that was something I'd never thought to do before. But the vast majority of tutorials I found were amateurish and unclear.

3. While at icon_tutorial, I answered someone's question. The first two comments both seemed to assume some basic knowledge and were, IMHO, useless (the second less so than the first, but still). When I looked at the asker's icons, I saw that they are still in the pixel fonts, curly fonts, stroke function phase, which meant they needed serious attention. You can see that I may have gotten... overzealous in my reply. At least overly long. But that's just my way. This isn't the first time this has happened, either. But that was when I realized, hey, you know, instead of having to type out paragraphs and paragraphs and create sample images every time I want to help someone, wouldn't it be easier if I just had a huge tutorial of EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT MAKING ICONS that I could point to?

And the idea was born.

Endnotes:
1. This makes me sound hugely egotistical, like I'm saying "oh, I'm such a fabulous iconmaker that I can teach everyone else!" That's not what I'm saying. I mean, I think I'm pretty good, but we all know that we're not exactly objective when it comes to judging our own icons.
2. Obviously this is not going to be finished this week. This post is so long because I intend to use it as my own reference on what I'm planning to do... I just thought maybe some people would be interested and want to offer help/encouragement/their potential future readership.