OBJECTION! icons

Affiliates

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:26:50 GMT

The following is objection's current list of affiliates. If you change icon journals, put your community on deleted status, or want me to refresh the three sample icons, feel free to leave a comment to this post with the new information. If you would like to be added to this list, feel free to comment too! :D

rosetintmyworld lunareuphoria lovemedead hitsuzen
oracion lucario
heavenlyquake kirie
crowded rubbish
confluence eimii
videogame_icons
gameawards

Gunslinger (female) - Ragnarok Online [video game]

Thu, 08 May 2008 08:04:41 GMT

* 16 icons total (6 alternate versions, sorry for not many extras this time 'round. A little tired~)
* Original Picture: HERE!
* Credit isn't necessary, but I do love critique and comments!
* Created for 10variations

Original Size

Rotated

Black&White

Mirrored

Double

Color Change

Whole Image

Textured

Plain Image

Non 100x100

001

002

003

004

005

006

Mei's Awards

Mon, 05 May 2008 23:10:56 GMT

FIRST PLACE;

SECOND PLACE;

THIRD PLACE;

MOD'S CHOICE;

SPECIAL BANNERS;

Frequently Asked Questions

Mon, 05 May 2008 22:56:26 GMT

1) Who is mei?
A non foolish fool who doesn't partake of foolish things. Simple enough, no?

2) Who is ryuuichi?
A foolish fool who foolishly irritates the foolishness of this website. In other words, the typical defense attorney.

3) What is up with your file names?
You know after spending anywhere between 30 minutes to five hours on an icon, my brain is too dead to actually come up with a witty name. Most of the time it'll just be a lyric from my current music or it'll be something completely random. Good for you guys at least, so you don't have to worry about renaming files P:

4) Did you know using fanart in icons is an evil sin and you're going to Hell?!
I prefer the artist to be credited over myself in any situation where I use fanart. I don't require credit and usually have communicated with the artist about the pictures I use. If I have used your art and you want me to take the icons down, feel free to tell me. If not, piss off.
Also, the quicker I get to Hell, the sooner I can bring the apocalypse /typical gawf kid response

5) Resources?
Located here. If I missed you, feel free to tell me. Especially for my tutorials.

-- To be edited with more questions as seen fit --

What is an objection? A miserable pile of graphics!

Mon, 05 May 2008 22:51:14 GMT

objection is the graphics community for the sexiest prosecutor ever, mei and the most foolish defense attorney ever, ryuuichi. Here you will find icons, layouts, friend's only banners, and other random things having to do with graphics including textures, gradients, screen caps, and everything else. If I conjure it, I'll post it. Simple enough to understand, ne?

This community uses tags and abuses them like no other. Feel free to take advantage of them yourself.

Older icon posts can be found at Aperture Science.

Tutorial 3: Fire's a Beautiful Sound

Mon, 05 May 2008 22:40:09 GMT

I figured in a fit of anger to write out another tutorial hehe. This one isn't one of my favorites, but was a fun icon to work with any ways. Hopefully there's a trick or two involved in this tutorial that assists you in making your own stuff. Photoshop only, I think, since it involves Hue/Saturation and Color Balance layers.

FIRE'S A BEAUTIFUL SOUND - TUTORIAL 3
to

» Prepare your base.

» My own base was a bit too light so I decided to duplicate the base and set the new layer at multiply 30%

» Take this texture (maker unknown, sorry ~) and set it to a new layer, multiply 100%

» Well now it's difficult to see the characters. It's okay though, that texture was just for a prettier background of the entire icon. Duplicate the first two layers (the base and the multiply layer) and set it as a new layer. This is where I cropped away as much as the white space as I wanted. You can be fairly lazy with this process, because the next step helps hide it if you used a white background. Personally I was in a rush to finish this icon for animechorus, so I didn't crop it too well :p

» Next step, I control + clicked the later to select all the empty space. Making a new layer, I went to edit -> stroke and added a stroke of 2 pixels, white, to the OUTSIDE (location). This help hides the crappy crop job I did. You can feel free to skip this step if you did a good cropping job or don't want a stroke. I set the layer to screen.

» I wanted to bring out certain colors in the icon, so I went to make a color balance layer (layer -> new adjustment layer -> color balance). Tinker around with the settings until you get something that looks perfect for your icon. Since this was a firey icon, I focused on reds and oranges.

» I've been on this huge Hue/Saturation kick so it's only natural I brighten up the icon a bit by doing that. Later -> New Adjustment Layer -> Hue / Saturation. I'm sure I did nothing too special except adding on more Saturation and finding a nice Hue to play with.

» I took a light texture focusing on the color red (maker unknown sorry!) and slapped it down as a new layer, screen 100%

» Texting time! I didn't do anything terribly fancy with this. I wrote 'Fire's a beautiful sound' in Adorable, 12 point. I also added a white stroke around the words, 2 pixels with screen opacity. This layer remains on normal.

» For this next step, I use a trick that was taught to me and one I don't feel would be nice writing up in a tutorial. So instead I'll give you the lazy man's method I use to use. Take this brush and set it as a new layer in black. Set the new layer to soft light and change the opacity. I usually run it low, anywhere between 10% - 30%, but it has a nice effect at deeper opacity levels as well. You can erase out of the background, if you want it to just be on the focus of the icon - which is what I did. There's a lot of different brushes you can use, some with diagonal line effects and others like the one I linked. It's a user's preference really.

» Next I took this beautiful gradient (once again maker unknown) and set it at lighten 100%. Different gradients work for different icons. Heck making your own could work just as well.

» Select all and make a new layer. Stroke -> 2 pixels white on the INSIDE (location) to create part of the border. I left this layer on normal.

» Next take this brush by wickedenough@livejournal.com and with the eyedropper tool, find a color in the icon you like and stamp it onto the icon. Ta-da, pretty nifty border achieved!

As always, I have the original .PSD I can send to people if they want the specifics. I'm sorry I don't have the actual colors / numbers for the hue/saturation and color balance levels, but this helps you build your own icon~

Tutorial 02: Shining Rose

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 04:18:35 GMT

Tonight we will be taking this image and making this icon:

Tutorial written for Adobe Photoshop 7.0 but I am sure it's easily translatable to other programs.

First off, you'll want to prepare your base following my last tutorial. Because of how dark the image is, I went ahead and made another screen layer at 50% opacity.

Make a new layer (Layer/New/Layer) and using the paint bucket too, filled it with the color #000015. Set this layer to exclusion (100% opacity).

Create a new layer and fill it with the color #A090A0. Set this layer to overlay (100% opacity). This brings out the purple more in the icon obviously. Depending on the main color of your base, you may want to substitute this with another color. Experiment some to see what you get personally.

Make another new layer and fill it with the color #C6B4AC. Set this layer to multiply (50% opacity). You can change the opacity based on what you feel looks good for your icon. 50% is usually my safe zone, so I stick with that for a lot of coloring. :)

Create a new layer and using this scratch texture (made by unknown, it was one of the ones I snagged from a deleted journal pack - if you made it let me know? :D) and place it at screen 50% opacity. You can change the opacity with this if you like, 100% makes the scratches really obvious while the lower you make it blends it. I advise changing the opacity around after the rest of the layers are in place though to get a feel of what looks good.

Next, you make another layer and use a light texture to create a bright glow. I slightly modified one of sanami26's simplelights pack and made this texture, by placing the red light where I wanted it and adding black to the rest of the space so it didn't look odd. Now this is a step most people usually use screen on, but for this icon I wanted it to be more vibrant and so I used lighten (100% opacity).

I went back to my original base and duplicated the layer, dragging it all the way to the top. Here I used Filter/Blur/Gaussian Blur with a radius of 3.0 to set a blur to the image. I desaturated the image and set it to soft light (100% opacity), which gave me the following effect;

Finally, I made a border. The easiest way to make a simple border is to create a new layer, then select the entire image by either pressing Control + A or clicking Select/All. After you have selected your icon, you go to Edit/Stroke. Here you can chose how thick to make the border, I usually go with 1-2 px. width. The location MUST be inside if the icon's dimensions are 100x100. Chose the color of the border, I chose #D2272D from the colors within the icon and accepted the settings.

And ta-da! If you don't like how any of the settings or colors turned out, feel free to go back and experiment for yourself. If there's any questions, don't hesitate to ask~

Resizing images / Making Bases + Handy Tips

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 03:30:26 GMT

I promised nickthefanboy I'd make some tutorials for him... so this is my first ever tutorial. I'm sure once I make more of these, I'll get better at wording myself :p

My original image is the following:

The first thing when making an icon is to have a good enough base. There are plenty of ways to crop an image down, it's just something you'll catch on for yourself. Some people like to crop off center, others like to center, etc. Cropping an unique angle is always a nice way to stand out, but some icons don't allow for such.

Now what you will want to do is make a nice even crop, preferably so the height matches the width. I use another program for my cropping, Jasc's Animation Shop, just because it's easier for me to see the numbers add up there than trying over and over again to make the right size in Photoshop. Several people have their own ways of doing it, so stick to the style you know and love. Once you have your crop set right, resize time!

Now a problem I notice with my version of Photoshop is that whenever I resize a large image to 100 x 100, there's this ugly noticeable border added to it.

See, isn't that ugly?! Don't stress, it's easy to get rid of. Just duplicate the base 1-2 times until you see it fade away. It depends on how light/dark your original image is, but for mine I only had to duplicate it once. You'll want to merge the layers now.

This is the base I have set up for myself:

Now there's several different things we can do from this point forward. My personal favorite is to clear up the image slightly. To do that, you'll duplicate your base and go to filter/sharpen/sharpen, which makes it crispy. Then you'll go to image/adjustments/desaturate to make it greyscale and set the opacity anywhere between 1-40, depending on how clear you want your image. Mine usually are around 20-30% opacity.

Merge layers and you have a much clearer icon.

Sometimes it'll come out a little lighter or darker than you'll be able to work with. To remedy those...

TOO LIGHT:
Duplicate layer and set the duplicated layer to multiply. Fool around with the opacity until you get something you like. The magic number is basically whatever you decide on (:

Ta-da. Much darker image to work with!

TOO DARK:
Duplicate the layer and set the second layer to screen. You'll have to fool around with the opacity, usually around 50% helps with this.
Then you'll duplicate the base again, dragging it to the top. Set this new layer to soft light, fooling around with the opacity again.

For this look I did 50% opacity screen, 60% soft light.

And another fun thing people like to do with their bases is to gaussian blur. You'll duplicate your layer and go to filter/blur/gaussian blur. Set the radius to 3.0 and accept. Then desatuarate the image and set it to soft light.

This effect is really nice when you have used a lot of textures in your icon and would like to maintain some clarity.

Remember these techniques because I'll refer you to this post a lot probably 8)

Ninja (female) - Ragnarok Online [video game]

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:40:02 GMT

This is my second 10 variations challenge (the other I completed on LiveJournal) and both have been of art from Ragnarok Online. The art for that game is the only one I've managed to have luck with making several different icons out of it, heh.

* 36 icons in total - 10 themed, 26 alternate versions.
* Original picture.
* Credit isn't necessary, but I do love critique and comments!