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 Search Icon |
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Add Search icon to cartImage sizes: 256x256, 48x48, 32x32, 24x24, 16x16
File formats: BMP, GIF, PNG, ICO
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Painting Images with Aqua Effect
Creating a brand-new image having the familiar "aqua" effect is easier than you think – if you have proper tools. You can make an icon from scratch by only using a free, small and easy icon editor.Creating a brand-new image having the familiar "aqua" effect is easier than you think – if you use proper tools. To create an icon from scratch, a professional, small and simple icon editor such as IconLover 5 (aha-soft.com) is all you really need.
For an instance, let us draw an aqua-style icon for "Add", a glass ball with a "plus" sign in it. To start, 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 save a color by adding it to Custom Colors; this comes really handy if you need to draw a matching set of images.
Using the Transparency bar or one of the Transparency presets, set your new icon’s transparency. For this tutorial, the ball will be fully opaque. In the same way, you can set background color; for simplicity’s sake, we’ll leave the background transparent for now.
To make a circle of your chosen 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. Holding the left mouse button down, move the mouse cursor within the drawing area to create 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 drawn a circle!
To add volume and dimension to the flat circle, we’ll need to add 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 managed quite easily altogether by simply selecting Aqua from the Effects menu. Keep all sliders at their current positions 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 properties. There are multiple settings 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 more like a button rather than a crystal ball. Let’s fix that by adding a drop-down shadow! To add a shadow effect to your icon, click "Drop shadow" from the Effects menu. You can stick to defaults, or move 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 embed the ‘plus’ sign into the image, 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 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.
That’s it! You’ve just created a crystal ball that matches the famous Aqua style! All you needed was a professional icon editor, IconLover 5, a few clicks and a few minutes of your time. Easy!
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