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(Software: NeoIcon/ Hardware: PowerMac 7500/100)
| Like any form of illustration, before you begin, it's best to give a rough pencil sketch on paper. And also have in mind what kind of drawings you want, say a cartoon one or a serious one? I start by sketching roughly how my icon should look on a rough paper, and from there, it's easier to begin with mouse clicks in the computer. |
| (1) |
(2) |
(3) |
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| From the drafted concept on a rough paper, start by drawing an oval shape as guide. Ignore all jagged edges as we can touch them up later (3). |
Freely draw out the shapes, adjusting is the key here, get the rough shape out, visualizing and planning what to draw first. In here, I thing the leaf and the eyes should be up first. |
Get these 2 important feature right and clean first, pixels by pixels clicking. Note that I joint the eyes together, it was not in plan. But I do it because I think it;ll look better, be flexible with your illustrations. |
| (4) |
(5) |
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| Flat colors are filled in. I add the mouth, however, it's still very rough. |
Compare with (4), you'll noticed which Pixels are adjusted.Eyes were also adjusted to make it look better. Since we're doing cute icons, I let the mouth be at one side. This stage of adjusting is crucial, thus more time is spent on deleting and adding of pixels. The leaf on top had been shifted to look more natural and not so stiff. |
| (6) |
(7) |
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| Shadings. While doing, it's always advisable to look at the 32x32 version of the icons, so that shadings at done smoothly. (a) is shaded in a way to get the rounded 3d shape out. Same goes to (b) but (c) is made all the way to the edge to help (a) get the effect. |
While it looks like tomato, dots are added, make one and copy paste the rest. Again, be aware of the small 32x32 pixel icons at all times, instead of making 1 pixels dots. 4 pixels ones were created to look better. |
| (8) |
(9) (FINAL) |
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Done! If you have notice, the strawberry seems a bit too round. Well, as far as I'm concern, I do my icons to fit as much as the 32 x 32 pixel canvas space as possible, so I actually stretch the sides a little, I think it's ok. |
| Little move lines were added to the sides, left and right to simulate it's "shaking". :) |
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