Musings on, Art, Skinning, Computers, and the True meaning of Life. (AKA The Lego Theory)
Lets wrap this puppy up.
Published on July 14, 2005 By mormegil In Icons
Icon-A-Day # 104 & 105 (Lose Ends: Part 1)

Well it has been about a week since I posted the complete
Icon-A-Day IconPackager Pack. The downloads have been strong, witch is nice. And over all people seem to be happy with it.

One funny thing that has come up is that, as I was saying from the beginning, the final pack is in IconPackager 3.0 format, and allot of people have been having problems installing it. The good news is IconPackager 3.0 is a free upgrade to anyone who owns any version of IconPackager. So if you haven't already gotten it, you can download IconPackager 3.0
here.

The other funny thing is that There are several Icons in the final pack that were never done as tutorials. Mostly because we had covered all the steps to make them in other tutorials, and because I wanted to wrap up the project. So today and in theses last few Icon-A-Day Tutorials we wrap up all our lose ends, usually by creating several Icons, and allot of references to the earlier tutorials that will illustrate better haw we did them.

Today we will start up the final wrap up with the "Default Applications" Icon, and the "Settings" Icons. The settings Icon is only used in Windows 9x and 2000. But since it is so easy to do we will do it. And beside it makes a cool icon.
 
Step 1:

For the Settings Icon we simply remove the checkmark and background form the
Folder Options Icon, and remove the folder.

Step 2:
 
The only thing we really need to do to make this a stand alone Icon, is tweak the shadow. We do this with our standard
Shadow Techniques.

Step 3:

That's about it. Now we have a nice Icon. I am using it for settings, but it would have been good for the Control Panel as well.



Step 1:

Our next Icon is a bit more difficult, but still very simple. We start with the Circle tool. Making 3 Circles, and for Pie peaces.


Step 1:

Now I shade the outer circles with the some radial fills, and use a blend to fill the center, making it seam spherical.
A good example of this is in the
Gloss Tutorial.

Step 1:

Now using simple
Transparency Techniques I set them to a multiply transparency, at 0%. and  move my four pie peaces back into place, giving them our four colors.

Step 4:

Now using our standard Gloss Techniques I give the Icon a nice bit of glare.

Step 5:

Once more we go to our standard Drop Shadow Techniques and give the Icon a nice slanted back shadow.

Step 6:

And last we give it a nice reflection with our standard
Reflection Techniques. And polish it off by copying our settings Icon, and placing it in front.

Finished Icon Image.




Download the Completed Icons here.

Tomorrow I will show you how I made the CAB and REG files. Two of the new files in IconPackager 3.0.
 
Read the other Icon-A-Day Articles:
(Icon-A-Day Index)

Check out the CorelDRAW for Skinner Index, for links to all the related Video Tutorials.

And don't forget to check for all the Icon-A-Day icons as they get made, in the
Miscellaneous Icons Gallery at Wincustomize.com
All Images and Text in this tutorial are © Paul Boyer, and may not be reused without written permission.


Comments
on Jul 14, 2005
Nice to get the final touches!

BTW - I have been fortunate in that the Icon-A-Day V3 package (as well as IP3), applied without a hitch on my machine. Works well with all the Blinds I use, it even adds a nice touch to XP Luna (default blue).

The reflections also work very nicely with many of the dock backgrounds. All in all, quite a successful project.

Thanks a million, Teach.

Note - might want to check the link - goes to 103.