Hello people! Today is a tutorial post day and I’m going to make an icon tutorial.
We’re going to make an icon like this:
1. Open an image, here’s mine, it’s from Anime Vision Gallery:
This one is already resized to avatar size 100×100; if you have your own, select what you want to put in the avatar with the rectangular marquee tool holding down the shift key on the keyboard to have a perfect square, crop and resize to 100x100px Image –>Image Size.
2. Now duplicate the layer right-clicking on the layer in the layer palette or clicking Layer –> Duplicate Layer. Desaturate the copy Image –> Adjustments –> Desaturate you’ll get a white&black image; then set blending mode to soft light.
Now merge them Layer –> Merge Layers.
3. Now we’ll add some textures; I download them from Colorfilter they’re awesome! Here the one I used, the name is colorfilter_mix026.jpg so go to that site and download it 
(click on 100×100 textures and choose mix packs from the menu at the top, it’s the first pack):
Now that you have downloaded that texture, open it, go to Select –> All, copy it ctrl c and paste it in your avatar ctrl v. Now change blanging mode to Hard Light with opacity 50%. You’ll get something like this:
4. Now we add another texture always from Colorfilter (click on full base on the same menu as before and download set 4, it’s called colorfilter_base065.jpg).
Do as before: open it, go to Select –> All, copy it ctrl c and paste it in your avatar ctrl v. Now change blanging mode to Hard Light with opacity 100%. Now you have something like this:
5. Of course the original image is hard to see so duplicate it and then move the copy at the top of the others. Now set blending mode to Overlay, you’ll get this:
6. Now add a new layer (Layer –> New –> Layer…) or shift+ctrl+n and add some brushes, I usually put each brush I use on a new layer so I can change every single one to its own blanding mode.
Congratulation, you created your first icon. Now you can choose different textures and try different blanding modes . This is the risult:
