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 Hard Drive Icon |
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Add Hard Drive icon to cartImage sizes: 256x256, 48x48, 32x32, 24x24, 20x20, 16x16
File formats: BMP, GIF, PNG, ICO
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Painting Pictures with Aqua Effect
Designing a fresh new image featuring the renowned "aqua" effect is easier than you think – if you have proper tools. You can make an image from scratch by only using a free, small and lightweight icon editor.Creating a brand-new icon featuring the familiar "aqua" effect is easier than you think – if you have proper tools. To create an icon from scratch, a professional, lightweight and easy icon editor such as IconLover 5 (aha-soft.com) is all you really need.
For example, let us make an aqua-style icon for "Add", a glass ball with a "plus" sign inside. First, you’ll need to draw a circle of a certain color. Select the color from the Color properties menu. Just so you know, you can always memorize a color by adding it to Custom Colors; this comes very handy if you need to draw a matching set of icons.
With the Transparency bar or with one of the Transparency presets, define your new image’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 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. Holding your 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 painted a circle!
To add volume and dimension to the flat circle, 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 famous ‘glass reflection’ look employed by the aqua effect.
To draw 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 by simply selecting Aqua from the Effects menu. Keep all sliders at their defaults 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 create 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 volume 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 the icon, click "Drop shadow" from the Effects menu. You can use the defaults, or adjust the settings around by getting a flat button, a lens, or a ball. It all 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 icon, click on the Text tool icon in the left Tools menu or press "T" to get the text properties window. Make sure the "Image transparency" box is selected. This box 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.
Voila! You’ve just designed a crystal ball that matches the famous Aqua style! All you needed was a professional icon editor, IconLover 5, a few mouse clicks and a few minutes of your time. Easy!
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