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).

( More details, including a request for help from PSP and GIMP users and a possible table of contents. )

( In case you want to know what specifically brought this on. )

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.