First I want to say that if I'm not working on a request, I rarely have the finished icon in mind when I start. I just start, and fiddle and see what happens along the way. This time, I started out with this screen cap from Hugh Laurie - Devoted to Hugh:

and this brush from 77words.

(it's been resized)

So, I opened a new 100 x 100 document with a white background, put the brush on a new layer, removed the black square on the right, cropped my pic to fit in there, and sharpened it using unsharp mask. It looks like this:

(I put a light border around it to help it show up.)

Ok, well that's a good start, but needs more work. I picked this texture by anglesey:

,

desaturated it and placed it just above the white layer, set the opacity to 54%. We now have this, but I have removed the border that was put on earlier. I only put that on to show up in this tut.

Now I'm wanting a splash of color. I removed the other black rectangle and put a red and orange texture there instead. I do not know where that texture came from, but I don't think I made it myself. It looked like too much color, so I paste the black rectangle back on top of it, then use a quick mask to fade the black out to the right. Now it looks like this:

I know what I want the icon to say, and at this point I see a good spot to place the text, so I go ahead and put it on there. I used a font called AnniesHand (which may not be a free font, I have many font cd's) to write the word "bluff". I made a copy of that layer and used gaussian blur to make a broad shadow under the text. Here is the result:

Now I'm thinking it needs just a splash more color. I used the rectangular selection tool to select a very skinny strip of the orange and red texture, copy it, place it on a new layer under the word "bluff". I used a quick mask to fade the strip off to the right. I then use the color picker to select a red from that same texture, and use a brush (probably from Creepy Dolly) to add another splash of color in the lower right hand corner. We have now progressed to this:

Looking pretty good, but we have some balance issues, so I use some more Creepy Dolly brushes, a tiny text brush from who knows where (check out my resource post to find tons of goodies that other folks have made.) and even a couple brushes I made myself to add more decoration and balance. Notice the swirl brush in the bottom left corner (I made that one) goes over the top of everything and helps to tie it all together. I like how the loops in that brush imitate the arch in the red and orange texture, and seem to highlight some of the circles from the texture layer. I applied all the brushes in black, each one on a separate layer, then fiddled with the opacity of each layer until I was happy. (You may also wish to mess with the blending options, but I didn't for this icon.) Now it's all come together: I slapped a one pixel "almost black" border around the edges on a new layer, and reduced the opacity of that layer to 50%. I call this done:

I have put this icon up for grabs, so please feel free to take it if you wish. I do ask that you credit my icon request community, icondoitdotnet, if you use the icon, please. I hope this tutorial helps you get your own creative juices flowing and also lets you find some more excellent resources!

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