This tutorial was made using GIMP, but I'm pretty sure you can use it with any program since I use tips from PS/PSP tutorials on GIMP all the time. Also this tutorial is not meant to be followed exactly %100, feel free to use different images and textures, add brushes, ect. This is really just a basic guideline, besides if you follow this exactly you'll just end up making the same thing over and over. XD
Resources used in this tutorial are from: Celestial Star, ColorFilter, and Illustrious Forums Gallery.
Open GIMP (or whatever program you use to make graphics with) and make a new 100x100 image. Find a picture you want to use, I'll be using one of Lee Junki I got at Illustrious' Gallery. Drag and drop the image you'll be using to the new image window you opened. Now move it around until you get your image where you want it, also feel free to resize the image at this time. Once done with that you can select layer to image size so that the not needed parts of the image are gone. Now let's get to making this look less like a cropped pic and more like a nice icon~
Get yourself a nice texture, I'm going to use this one from Celestial Star, and open the texture as a new layer (just drag and drop it). Change the mode of the texture layer to multiply. My icon now looks like so (the one to the left)
Well this doesn't look very awesome right now does it? No worries, all I need to do is erase the parts of texture covering Junki and now it looks like the icon on the right. Looks better, but personally I think it looks a bit plain so let's add another texture. This time I'll be using this one from ColorFilter, again just add it as a new layer (drag and drop), and change this texture's layer mode to screen. It now looks like the below image on the left.
The original image of Junki now seems a bit too light and blurred so to fix that just select that original layer and go to filters > enhance > unsharp mask and now our icon looks like the one above at the right, better right? Although it's a bit too dark now, so make a new layer above all the others and fill it with just white, and set the layer mode to overlay. If it looks to bright just change the opacity a bit.
We could have stopped already and just saved it after the last step, but I wanted to put add some text since it seemed a bit empty. In black, using the font Times New Roman (italic) I just typed Junki, then rotated it a little. The text was kinda hard to read (well the 'J' anyways) so I duplicated the text layer and inverted the color then used the motion blur filter twice and moved that duplicate layer below the original text. &&There you go! That's it. Hopefully wasn't too complicated and was easy enough to understand and be of help.
