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 Floppy Icon |
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Add Floppy icon to cartImage sizes: 256x256, 48x48, 32x32, 24x24, 20x20, 16x16
File formats: BMP, GIF, PNG, ICO
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Painting Images with Aqua Effect
Creating a brand-new image having the renowned "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 lightweight icon editor.Creating a brand-new image featuring the famous "aqua" effect is easier than you think – if you use proper tools. To create an icon 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 inside. To start, you’ll need to draw a circle of a certain color. Pick the color from the Color properties menu. Just so you know, you can always save a color by adding it to Custom Colors; this comes very handy if you need to draw a matching set of images.
Using the Transparency bar or with one of the Transparency presets, set your new icon’s transparency. For this tutorial, the ball will be fully opaque. Similarly, you can set background color; for simplicity’s sake, we’ll keep the background transparent for now.
To make a circle of selected color, select the Filled Ellipse tool by clicking the Filled Ellipse icon in the Tools menu, which is on the left of the drawing area. With the left mouse button down, move the mouse cursor within the drawing area to draw an ellipse. The ellipse changes its size as you move the mouse. To create an ideal circle, hold Shift while drawing. That’s it, you have just created a circle!
To add volume and dimension to the flat circle, we’ll need to add some special effects. There are tons of them built into IconLover! You can add shadows, gradients, transparency channels, and of course, the famous ‘glass reflection’ look employed by the aqua effect.
To make an icon matching Apple’s Aqua style, you’ll need to add a reflection and a shadow to the circle. This can be done quite easily altogether by simply selecting Aqua from the Effects menu. Keep all sliders and values at their current positions for now, and you’ll get a beautiful shiny sphere as a result.
Now let’s add an artist’s touch and make your icon truly unique. Go back to that Aqua dialog and have a carefull look at the properties. There are plenty of properties available to tweak, allowing you to draw something never seen before. Go ahead and move the sliders to see how your icon can look!
As a final touch, let’s add some dimension to your newly created icon. While glowing and shiny, it still looks like a button 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 adjust 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 ground.
To add the ‘plus’ sign into the icon, click on the Text tool icon in the left Tools menu or press "T" to invoke the text properties window. Make sure the "Image transparency" box is selected. This means that your text will not be transparent, only the area around it will be. Changing 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.
That’s it! 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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