Some of the icons in Echo Bazaar took a mere twenty minutes to create from sketch to site, while others - usually the simple ones - took many days. The most extreme example of this is the little button that gives a tweetable postcard of your location, which took two weeks, fifteen iterations, one very unprofessional huff and a semi-serious threat to replace the existing art with a pair of luminescent green breasts. And after all that, maybe five people clicked the goddamned thing. Anyway, I thought it might be fun (and pleasantly narcissistic) to run through the evolution of a single icon. Typically, the process starts with a brief from Alexis. In this case:
“A wild-haired lunatic with eyes and mouth agape and a blood-dripping meat-cleaver. Sticky stuff dripping from his mouth. Expensive-looking clothes in disarray, evening dress maybe. Narcotic honey is the drug of choice downstairs. This gent has overdone it.”
Which led to the following, somewhat crappy sketch (done in ArtRage on a WACOM pad):
(Can I just say, I must have drawn a thousand top hats in the last three months? Thank you, I feel better now).
Next we shift into Photoshop, tidy up the lines, cut out the crappy bits, resize and add a cutout filter. Practically everything in EB gets a cutout filter at some point, it gives images a lovely classic cartoony feel, and negates my tendency towards wavy, wishy-washy lines. Like so.
Not sure what's happened to his nose here. Ah well, we'll put it back later. More clean-up and adjustment follows, and eventually we get an outline we're happy with. One of the most useful tricks I've learned on the Echo Bazaar crash-course is the usefulness of clear silhouettes in icons. If you stick a colour overlay on your image and you can't tell what it is, chances are it will be a lousy icon. In this case, it's relatively readable:
Time to add some colour. We go back to the outline and remove all white with the magic eraser. Then we stick a new layer *beneath* the outline - this is very important for cartoony illustrations where you want to lay in big blocks of colour without losing the clarity of the black outline or going over the edges. A third layer holds shadows and highlights.
...and the nose seems to be back, which is nice. Incidentally, nailing the metal shine on that cleaver took ages. I looked at a lot of knives and daggers on Google, but eventually I just borrowed my girlfriend’s cleaver, stuck it under a desk lamp and copied.
Finally, we add a background - just a simple gradient in EB's house colours (pale beige and slightly darker beige), resize and convert to a PNG.
and that's the finished product. You can't really tell he's dribbling honey any more, to be honest. But he does look nice and mad.