chacu_icons

From these images: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
To this:

Tools: Again, this tutorial was written with GIMP in mind. I use Layer Masks and some Curves.

PART I: The Composition
1. Cutting characters from their background
2. Setting up the canvas
3. Pasting characters in
4. The background
PART II: The Coloring
5. Individual curves
6. General coloring effects
7. Final fix

← Feel free to skip to whichever section you're interested in -- this is a LOOOONG tutorial

PART I: The Composition

STEP 1: Cutting out the characters

First, I cut out all seven characters, one by one. The way I do that is by selecting the interesting part of a character (be sure to minimize how much of the character is cut-off -- don't cut off the top of their head, their hands, their shoulders, etc. if at all possible) and making a new image from that selection. (In GIMP: 1. Ctrl+C to copy; 2. File -> Create -> From Clipboard)

For Catelyn, I ended up with this:

Unfortunately, I couldn't avoid cutting off Catelyn's cape, and that will cause a tiny bit of inconvenience later on.

Now create a new layer and drag it under the cropped image and fill this layer with a color of your choice (choose a color distinguishable from the background).

On the image of the character, add a layer mask (Layer -> Mask -> Add Layer Mask). Now your layers should look like this:

Now we can cut out Catelyn.

Explanation of Layer Masks:
What a mask does is that it determines the opacity/transparency of the pixels of the layer it's associated with. Black = fully transparent, white = fully opaque; different shades of grey make it semitransparent. I like to use masks to cut people out because they're more forgiving than just using an eraser. You can "erase" parts of the image by painting black on the layer mask, but you can also "unerase" parts of the image simply by painting white.

My Cutting-Out Process:
Generally, I start out with a large Circle brush to get rid of the big blocks of background quickly then switch to smaller Circle brushes as I get closer to the character. Finally, I use a size 7 Circle Fuzzy airbrush to clean up the edges of the character to look softer and less angular.

Tips:
I recommend changing the color of the layer underneath every so often as that will help you see spots you've missed. You don't need to be too meticulous, though. The image will be scaled down anyway, so some mistakes won't be visible.

The result is something like this:

Then I generally duplicate the layer with Catelyn on it and apply the layer mask (Layer -> Mask -> Apply Layer Mask). And now we just have Catelyn!

Now repeat this for the other six!

STEP 2: Setting up the canvas

In order to make seven icons that seemed to flow into each other, I started out with a 700 px wide by 100 px tall image. Then I added guides at the borders between the icons to mark off the individual icon boundaries. In GIMP, you can do this by clicking on the rulers and dragging:

Tips:
The info bar at the bottom tells you the x-coordinate of the guide. You want to set your guides up to be at 100, 200, 300, etc. Also, for guides, sometimes you want to have things snap to them and sometimes that gets annoying. You can set that option with View -> Snap to Guides. You can also temporarily hide guides with View -> Show Guides (remove checkmark).

STEP 3: Pasting the characters in

Now we're ready to take the cut-out characters and arrange them nicely. One of the advantages to this whole banner thing is that not all the characters have to be the same size. The original Jaime and Eddard pictures are zoomed out, full-body shots, while Margaery and Oberyn are focused on their heads and upper body. I took advantage of that by making Margaery and Oberyn in the foreground and Jaime and Eddard higher up, in the background. The other three characters are sort of in between.

To copy and paste the characters, go back to the cut-out images and select all (Ctrl+A) while on the top layer (the layer where the mask has already been applied). Some trial and error is needed to get the relative sizes and placements right. I ended up with this:

STEP 4: The background

For the background, I wanted something grey and rough-looking. So I took a large enough chunk of this scratch texture by

helloimkelsey (I used an area 700px wide by 160px tall), pasted it into my image on its own layer under all the people layers, and then inverted the colors (Colors -> Invert). Now the background looks like this:

Then I wanted to add "Westerosorting" of some kind to the background. The text I decided on was:
Text: "WESTEROS SORTING"
Color: #616161
Font: Gloucester MT Extra Condensed
Size: 91 px
Layer Mode set to: Hard Light (to make it transparent-looking)

Then I added a layer filled with #bcbcbc on top and set that to Multiply at 50% to tone down the brightness of the background layers. The result:

PART II: The Coloring

Now the fun part -- coloring! The first thing we need to do is make all the characters look consistent. Here I used my fallback method -- curves.

Explanation of Curves:
In GIMP, the curves dialog is located at Colors -> Curves. With curves, the horizontal axis is the "input" and the vertical axis is the "output". The diagonal line is normal: inputs = outputs. However, you can change that line so that, say, colors on the right side (brighter colors) become even brighter (or you can make them darker). So in this way, curves act as a brightness/contrast adjuster and a levels adjuster.

But that's not all! There are three other channels: Red, Green, and Blue. These work similarly -- you can make it so that pixels that are high (or low) on red contain more (or less) red. And you can make the picture redder overall, or less red (i.e. more cyan); or greener overall, or less green (i.e. more magenta); or bluer overall, or less blue (i.e. more yellow). So it's very useful for tweaking colors as well!

STEP 5: Individual curves

I started off with Jaime -- using curves like this, I made him lighter and more purplish. Jaime also came out quite blurry when resized so I sharpened him: Filters -> Enhance -> Sharpen; Sharpness=30). The result:

Then Catelyn: the same curves didn't work here because Catelyn's skin is already too blue. Instead we want to give her warmer colors by toning DOWN the blue this time, and still upping the red. I ended up using these curves, and I sharpened Catelyn a little as well. Also, I mentioned the problematic cape cutoff in the previous part. Using the eyedropper to get Catelyn's new cape color, I brushed in a continuation of her cape. This is the result:

Now Eddard: again, I didn't like the way the curves looked. His skin isn't as blue as Catelyn's so hers didn't work, and there wasn't enough brightness or contrast with Jaime's. So I made a new set of curves, with the most significant difference being the value channel. The result:

Now Margaery: none of the previous curves looked good. Jaime's was too purple, Catelyn's was too yellow, and Eddard's was too bright. So yet more curves! These I think were based on Catelyn's but adding back some of the blue that I had taken away previously. The result:

Then I skipped Theon and went to Viserys instead. Colorwise, he looked very similar to Margaery so I used the same red, green, and blue channels, but changed the value channel a bit until they looked good.

Theon was tough because there were so many highlights in the original image that he kept on coming out too shiny. I came up with another set of curves after a bunch of random tweaking, but I honestly can't give any tips about this since it was all just trial and error. Also had to sharpen him up too.

Finally, Oberyn. I'm glad to say that I tried Theon's curves on him and they looked rather nice.

SO! Now we have:

STEP 6: General coloring effects

The previous step was hard, because all the coloring had to be done individually, but now they more or less look unified in their coloring, so we can work on them as a group.

First I wanted to give everyone a bluish tint to their skin. In Photoshop, you can do a dark yellow fill layer set to Exclusion, but I instead made a layer on top filled with #82f5ff set to Multiply at 30%. The result:

Then, underneath the bluish tint layer, I ended up adding another fill layer, this one filled with #d4dfff set to Grain Extract at 40%. The result is nice richer colors:

Then I thought it might be nice to turn some of the darker colors into purple. I guess I was in a purple mood. To do that, I made a layer at the top filled with #3b003a and set to my favorite setting of Lighten Only at 100%. The result -- purple accents:

But this icon set wouldn't be complete without... a gradient! I added one last layer to the top, this one set to Grain Merge at 100%. Using a white to transparent gradient, I dragged my mouse from somewhere a bit below the image to about halfway up the image. The result gives the characters a kind of glow:

STEP 7: Final fix

But wait! I wanted the background a nice stony grey and now it's... greenish. I looked to see what layers did that and I found out it was the Multiply and Grain Extract layers from the previous step.

So using the trusty layer masks again, I quickly erased the parts of the fill layers that affected the background. (Only had to do it for one layer -- I copied the mask and pasted it for the second layer's mask.) Like so: