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 Gear with Shadow Icon |
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Add Gear with Shadow icon to cartIcon sizes: 256x256, 128x128, 48x48, 32x32, 24x24, 20x20, 16x16, 512x512
File formats: ICO, GIF, PNG, BMP
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Creating Pictures with Aqua Effect
Creating a brand-new image having the renowned "aqua" effect is easier than you think – if you use proper tools. You can design an icon from scratch by only using a free, small and easy icon editor.Designing a fresh new image featuring the famous "aqua" effect is easier than you think – if you have proper tools. To draw an image from scratch, a professional, small and simple icon editor such as IconLover 5 (aha-soft.com) is all you really need.
For an instance, let us draw an aqua-style icon to represent "Add", a glass ball with a "plus" sign inside. To start, you’ll need to draw a circle of a chosen color. Pick the color from the Color properties menu. By the way, you can always save a color by adding it to Custom Colors; this comes very handy if you need to draw a matching set of icons.
With the Transparency bar or with one of the Transparency presets, set your new image’s opacity. For this tutorial, the ball will be fully opaque. In the same way, you can specify background color; for simplicity’s sake, we’ll keep the background transparent for now.
To draw a circle of your chosen color, select the Filled Ellipse tool by clicking the Filled Ellipse icon in the Tools menu, which is on the left of the drawing area. Holding the left mouse button down, move the mouse within the drawing area to create an ellipse. The ellipse changes its size as you move the mouse. To create an ideal circle, hold Shift while drawing. That’s it, you have just created a circle!
To add volume and dimension to the flat circle, we’ll need to apply some special effects. There are tons of those built into IconLover! You can add shadows, gradients, transparency channels, and of course, the renowned ‘glass reflection’ look employed by the aqua effect.
To draw an icon matching Apple’s Aqua style, you’ll need to add a reflection and a shadow to the circle. This can be done quite easily by simply selecting Aqua from the Effects menu. Keep all sliders at their defaults for now, and you’ll get a beautiful shiny sphere as a result.
Now let’s have some fun and make your icon truly unique. Go back to that Aqua dialog and have a carefull look at the settings. There are plenty of properties available to adjust, allowing you to draw something never seen before. Go ahead and tweak the sliders to see how your icon can look!
As a final touch, let’s add some dimension to your newly created icon. While glowing and shiny, it still looks more like a button rather than a crystal ball. Let’s fix that by throwing a drop-down shadow! To add a shadow effect to the icon, click "Drop shadow" from the Effects menu. You can stick to defaults, or tweak the values around to get a flat button, a lens, or a ball. The look depends on the size of the shadow, its distance from the subject, and the angle at which it falls to the surface.
To add the ‘plus’ sign into the icon, click on the Text tool icon in the left Tools menu or press "T" to open the text properties window. Make sure the "Image transparency" box is ticked. This means that your text will not be transparent, only the area around it will be. Tweaking the "Use semi-transparency" setting gets your text the same level of transparency your primary color has. Type "+", and you’ll get the ‘plus’ sign inserted into the ball.
That’s it! You’ve just created a crystal ball that matches the famous Aqua style! All you needed was a professional icon editor, IconLover 5, a few mouse clicks and a couple of minutes of your time. Easy!
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