1wonderment | [Tutorial #21] Gothic Harriet

From this:

to this:

Requested by

chocolatefrogs
I started with a screencap of Harriet which I resized and cropped. The theme for this icon was "Wrong Genre Savvy" so I knew I wanted to make the icon feel "gothic" (as in gothic romance like The Romance of the Forest that Emma recommended). I decided that lightning would be a great way to show this. But I wanted to show extremes so I started out with a scene that is actually quite bright and sunny.

I added a levels layer and clicked auto to brighten the bottom of my image. Seems kind of weird, but I wanted to brighten a bit here because I'm going to be darkening the icon with the later layers and didn't want the icon to be too dark. Also, I wanted to make sure that Harriet could be seen.

Now to start darkening the icon. I added a Brightness/Contrast layer with the following settings: Brightness: -14, Contrast: 100. The shadows are dark, but the bright parts are still fairly bright.

Next, I focused on darkening the background (minus the sky, that'll happen later). I added a black and white gradient map layer but masked out Harriet and set it to soft light, 100% opacity.

Now to darken the sky! I added a color fill layer of 16112e, masked out everything except the white part at the top, and set the layer to multiply, 100% opacity.

I copy-merged and pasted the layer into the icon (CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+E or CTRL+SHIFT+CMD+E). Then I did a high pass filter on the layer (Filter>Other>High Pass) at a radius of 10. This layer helps Harriet to be more defined.

Now for the animated lightning texture! I dragged the texture to my icon and grouped them together in a folder. Then I set each layer to exclusion, 100% opacity. I hid all of the layers except the bottommost one.

I duplicated the folder, blurred all of the texture layers in the new folder, and moved it so it only covers the bottom part to show how the light is hitting Harriet and the bottom of the icon. Then I set each layer to soft light, 60% opacity. I hid all of the layers except the bottommost one.

At this point, I started working on the frames for the animation. But you could also do it at the end of the tutorial. Just keep in mind that if you do the frames at this point that you will need to select all the frames when adding any additional layers to ensure that your icon doesn't have any weird movements. If it seems too complicated, you can do the frames at the end of the tutorial The only thing that you would have to keep in mind is that each folder of texture should have the corresponding layer visible on the frame like layer 1 in folder 1 and layer 1 in folder 2 should both be visible in the first frame. So on and so forth. There is a psd file at the end of this tutorial, so you can see what I mean. Also, check out this video for a brief walkthrough for the animation part.

But the icon didn't feel "gothic" enough so I added this texture by gfxgurl and set it to multiply, 100% opacity.

I decided I didn't want the colors from the texture to come through, so I added a black-and-blue gradient map (000000 to 7eaafa) clipped it (Alt + Click between the two layers) to the texture and set the gradient map to color, 50% opacity.

I wanted there to be a little more glow so I added a color fill layer of f2f5cb and used the layer mask to "paint" some glowy parts and blurred the glowy parts with Gaussian Blur.

Next, I wanted the colors to be more vibrant. I added a Vibrance layer with the following settings: Vibrance: 100, Saturation: 100.

Lastly, I added a gradient layer with the following settings and set to Normal, 12% opacity: Gradient: white to transparent, Style: radial, Angle: 90, Scale: 100%, all boxes unchecked except for align with layer. If you didn't work on the animation part before, this would be the time to add your frames and go through the steps of making the textures layer visible from the bottom to the top.