chromicons

Late start >.< Icons under cut.

The image I used was this promotion photo of Mori Yuki in the 2010 film Space Battleship Yamato, as played by Kuroki Meisa. She's different from the anime/manga character shown here: one complaint I read was that by making her a top-gun space fighter pilot the film was just copying BSG... but I loved seeing her kick ass.

I used GIMP for the first time to make these icons: leveling up from Paint >.< GIMP is a free downloadable program and I recommend it. It opens in 3 resizeable windows, which makes it great for using on a netbook. You can work with multiple layers and do a lot of image manipulation. This challenge is great for learning a new program because it encourages you to push all the buttons and see what they do....

1	2	3	4	5

6	7	8	9	10

11	12	13	14	15

So, a few things I learned about GIMP:

Firstly, it is very easy to crop a picture! Click rectangular select from the toolbox, start choosing an area, and hit shift while choosing to select a square. Once you have a square, from the "image" menu choose "crop to selection" and then "scale image" to make it 100 by 100. (No more calculators! No more tears!)

1. You can right-click on a layer and create a mask, which means you can make parts of the original picture transparent. My picture had a busy background with lights and pipes. Here, I made the background white (you can see I messed up her hair on the left by making it too flat).
2. Same image as #1, but I added a layer underneath with stripes (she's a Black Tiger pilot in a yellow/black uniform... busy image, though!) and one on top with her name.
3. In the GIMP "artistic effects" menu there's a "cartoon" choice, which makes images look like this (black outlines, smoothed-out coloring). I blacked-out the background.
4. Same as #3, except I copied the layer and flipped the copy.
5. Again, same as #3, except I made her flipped face ghostly... rther like the devil on her shoulder...
6. I made a very sharp version, and then colored it with "colors"->"colorize".
7. Ditto.
8. The original very sharp image ("filter"->"enhance"->"sharpen").
9. #8 moved to the side with a background pattern of clouds.
10. trying out soft-focus. The black box at the left is too sharp and jarring (can be seen in #11)... I should have put the word over the image. The fonts in GIMP are the only thing I'm not crazy about: they seem very basic and hard to manipulate.
12. GIMP's "filter"->"combine"->"filmstrip" feature. Cute, but not really suited to icons.
13. GIMP's "filter"->"artistic"->"weave" feature. Looks like a horror movie! I like how her features separated, actually.
14. The "filter"->"distort"->"newsprint" feature, for a pop-art feel. You can change the size and types of the dots as well as color.
15. The #14 image combined with a red version of the original layer.

Hopefully, as I learn the program I'll get better. Any hints or links to tutorials appreciated!