 |
|
 | |
 | |
 | |
 | |
 | |
 | |
|
 | ||||||||
|
 |
 |
|
 LinkedIn Icon |
|
Add LinkedIn icon to cartIcon sizes: 256x256, 48x48, 32x32, 24x24, 16x16, 512x512
File formats: ICO, GIF, PNG, BMP
Purchase entire Free Social Media Icons now! View Free Social Media Icons now!
Download demo icons
Making Images with Aqua Effect
Creating a brand-new image having the famous "aqua" effect is easier than you think – if you use proper tools. You can create an image from scratch by only using a free, small and lightweight icon editor.Designing a fresh new icon featuring the renowned "aqua" effect is easier than you think – if you have proper tools. To draw an image from scratch, a professional, small and easy icon editor such as IconLover 5 (aha-soft.com) is all you really need.
For an instance, let us make an aqua-style icon to represent "Add", a glass ball with a "plus" sign inside. First, you’ll need to draw a circle of a certain color. Select the color you want from the Color properties menu. Just so you know, 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 images.
Using the Transparency bar or with one of the Transparency presets, define your new icon’s transparency. For this tutorial, the ball has to be fully opaque. Similarly, you can set background color; for simplicity’s sake, we’ll leave the background transparent for now.
To make a circle of selected 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. With your left mouse button down, move the mouse within the drawing area to create an ellipse. The ellipse changes its size and shape as you move the mouse. To create a perfectly round 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 many 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 make an icon matching Apple’s Aqua style, you’ll need to draw a reflection and a shadow to the circle. This can be done quite easily altogether by simply selecting Aqua from the Effects menu. Keep all sliders and values at their defaults for now, and you’ll get a beautiful shiny sphere as a result.
Now let’s add an artist’s touch and make your icon truly unique. Go back to that Aqua dialog and have a carefull look at the settings. There are plenty of settings available to adjust, allowing you to create 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 volume to your newly created icon. While glowing and shiny, it still looks like a lens rather than a crystal ball. Let’s fix that by throwing a drop-down shadow! To add a shadow effect to your icon, click "Drop shadow" from the Effects menu. You can stick to defaults, or adjust the values around to get a flat button, a lens, or a ball. The effect depends on the size of the shadow, its distance from the subject, and the angle at which it falls to the ground.
To add the ‘plus’ sign into the image, click on the Text tool icon in the left Tools menu or press "T" to get the text properties window. Make sure the "Image transparency" box is ticked. This box means that your text will not be transparent, only the area around it will be. Changing the "Use semi-transparency" setting assigns your text the same level of transparency your primary color has. Type "+", and you’ll get the ‘plus’ sign embedded into the ball.
That’s it! You’ve just drawn a crystal ball that matches the famous Aqua style! All you needed was a professional icon editor, IconLover 5, a few clicks and a couple of minutes of your time. Easy!
Copyright © 2009-2012 Aha-Soft. All rights reserved.
|
More info
