Musings on, Art, Skinning, Computers, and the True meaning of Life. (AKA The Lego Theory)
The Last of the Default Drives
Published on May 8, 2005 By mormegil In Icons
Icon 86 (Removable Drive)

We have one last Default Drive type: the Removable Drive icon. This used to be used most often for Zip Drives, Jazz Drives and the like. These days it is most commonly used to represent USB Drives, and most common of these are Thumb drives.  So I decided to go with that for our icon today.

I did not want to use some a real Thumb drive. Instead I am just going to make something up that will match the rest of our Icon-A-Day drive icons.  Off we go.
 
Step 1:

It is going to be a bit hard make this look good, since Thumb drives are usually longer than wide, and will be a bit thin to fill the Square icon. As always I start with some rectangles to start shaping our drive.

Step 2:

Once I have my forced perspective working I start with the USB Connection, using some mesh fills to give it a metallic look.

Step 3:

Now I give the connections some detail, the contacts inside the plug, and two "holes" in the plug.

 
Step 4:

Now we go back to our Mesh Tool and start giving the body of the drive some detail, bevels, and changes in the grey as we have used in the rest of our drives and hardware.

Step 5:

Now we give the drive body a brush texture with our Interactive Transparency Techniques.

Step 6:

To make sure this icon matches, we give the metal body of the icon a nice gloss.

Step 7:

Now we need our standard
Reflection.

Step 8:

Last we give the drive a nice
Shadow.
Finished Icon Image.
 





Click here to download the finished icon.
 

That brings us to the end of our standard Drive icons, but I still want to do a few more Bonus Drive icons. I also want to use these on my Mac so I am going to make sure we included all the CD and DVD types. I think we will try and take care of those next.

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 May 08, 2005
Excellent one, Paul.

BTW - I found a solution to my earlier trimming questions. I used the shaping docker > selected "Target Object" as the object to keep > trimmed the offset shape by clicking on it after clicking trim. This seemed to fix my dilemma of "How on earth do I trim to get that look?" - at least it looks similar to the glassy depth effect in the default file (uh, at least it looks right).

Took me long enough to figure that one out - eh?

I now think I can begin to tackle a full package with some reasonable skills in CDraw (that glass/silica thing was driving me crazy).

Thanks again for all your time and effort, looking forward to the balance of pack (and of course whatever purchasable goodies you may have up your sleeve for the future).
on May 08, 2005
Cool!

I got stuck on the first step.

Meowy blushes
on May 08, 2005
Ooh, how I wish I had CorelDRAW... I guess I'll be saving up for it after I buy my Creative Zen Micro... and about 1,000,000 songs from MSN.