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Victory Icon
Icon sizes: 256x256, 48x48, 32x32, 24x24, 20x20, 16x16
File formats: ICO, GIF, PNG, BMP
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Making Pictures with Aqua Effect
Designing a brand-new image featuring the familiar "aqua" effect is easier than you think – if you have proper tools. You can design an image from scratch by only using a free, small and easy icon editor.
Creating a fresh new icon featuring the renowned "aqua" effect is easier than you think – if you use proper tools. To create an image from scratch, a professional, lightweight and simple 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 in it. 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 memorize a color by adding it to Custom Colors; this comes really handy if you need to draw a matching set of icons.
With the Transparency bar or one of the Transparency presets, set your new icon’s transparency. For this tutorial, the ball has to be fully opaque. Similarly, you can specify background color; for simplicity’s sake, we’ll leave the background transparent for now.
To draw a circle of your chosen color, select the Filled Ellipse tool by clicking the Filled Ellipse button in the Tools menu, which is on the left of the drawing area. With your left mouse button down, move the mouse cursor 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!
In order for our flat circle to start looking like a crystal ball, 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 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. Just keep all sliders and values 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 look at the settings. There are plenty of properties available to tweak, allowing you to design 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 new icon. While glowing and shiny, it still looks like a lens rather than a crystal ball. Let’s fix that by adding a drop-down shadow! To apply a shadow effect to your icon, click "Drop shadow" from the Effects menu. You can stick to defaults, or tweak the values around by getting 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 embed the ‘plus’ sign into the image, 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. Adjusting 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.
Voila! You’ve just created a crystal ball that appears to be in 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!
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