Create the Minecraft Icon

Quick reference

• 00:04 Hello, Photoshopers and Minecrafters.
• 00:06 It was suggested that I create a tutorial on how to create the Minecraft icon
• 00:10 in Photoshop.
• 00:11 Let's get to it.
• 00:12 The first thing we need to do is to create our document and lay out our 3D shape.
• 00:17 In terms of the document size, I'm going to be starting with a 512 X 512 document.
• 00:22 Of course, you are free to use any size that you wish.
• 00:25 To make the creation of the 3D shape easier, let's go ahead and
• 00:28 lay out some guides to help our perspective.
• 00:31 Heading up to the view menu and then down to new guide,
• 00:33 we can tell Photoshop exactly where to put these guides.
• 00:37 We're gonna start with the vertical guides.
• 00:39 The first one will be placed at 5% to define the left edge.
• 00:43 The second one at 95% for
• 00:45 the right edge, and the third one smack in the middle at 50%.
• 00:49 For those wondering, I was able to set up a shortcut for
• 00:52 the new guide function in the keyboard shortcut editor, under the edit menu.
• 00:57 For the horizontal guides, the first one's gonna be placed at 16% for
• 01:00 the corners of the top box, the second one at 36%,
• 01:04 which will be the bottom edge of the top box, and finally, 79% for the final guide.
• 01:09 This will define the bottom corners.
• 01:12 Good, now that we have our guides up, let's create our shape.
• 01:16 When a design is complete, the shape that we are about to create won't be visible to
• 01:19 us, but it's definitely gonna help in the design process.
• 01:22 Go ahead and select your pen tool from the tools on the left, and
• 01:25 make sure that you have the shapes layer option selected at the top.
• 01:29 Now, draw out the top shape of the box.
• 01:32 I'm going to start in the middle and
• 01:33 create a diamond shape using the guides as a guide to where your point should go.
• 01:38 You might notice that your points snap to the guides.
• 01:41 This can be very helpful.
• 01:43 Now that the first shape is created,
• 01:44 I'm going to press the new shape layer icon at the top and
• 01:47 change the color, just so we can differentiate it between the other shapes.
• 01:51 Now, we can go ahead and
• 01:52 draw out the left side of the shape, again, using my guides as a reference.
• 01:57 Once that shape is done, click the new shape layer icon again,
• 02:01 change the color, and let's draw out the final shape on the right.
• 02:05 Don't stress too much over the colors of the shapes.
• 02:07 Again, you're not gonna be seeing these shapes once the final design is complete.
• 02:11 If you want to hide your guides now that we're finished, you can do so
• 02:13 under the view menu at the top.
• 02:16 Now that we have our basic shape, it's time to create the texture.
• 02:19 This process is going to be pretty bizarre, but
• 02:21 it's all gonna come together in the end.
• 02:23 Let's start by creating a new layer for our texture, and
• 02:26 we need to set our colors.
• 02:27 Our foreground color is going to be the darkest of the blocks,
• 02:31 which I'm going to set to 332316.
• 02:35 And the background color is going to be our light color,
• 02:39 which I'm gonna set to a5744d.
• 02:42 Of course, you're free to choose any colors that you wish.
• 02:45 With those set, grab your gradient tool from the left, choose the foreground to
• 02:49 background gradient, and make sure it's set to linear.
• 02:52 Once that's set, drag out a gradient from the top to the bottom.
• 02:57 This next step is gonna seem completely nuts, but
• 02:59 I'll explain why I'm doing it as we're going.
• 03:02 Head up to the filter menu, down to texture, and choose stained glass.
• 03:06 What I'm trying to do here is to get chunks of dark color
• 03:09 throughout the texture, which will eventually turn into blocks.
• 03:12 Creating contrast will be important when adding the next filter.
• 03:16 For these settings, the cell size is gonna be set to 27,
• 03:19 the border thickness all the way to 20, and put the light intensity at zero.
• 03:22 We've already gone ahead and set our colors with the gradient.
• 03:25 Now obviously, this looks nothing like blocks, but watch this.
• 03:29 Head back up to filter, down to pixelate, and then choose mosaic.
• 03:34 That's a lot better.
• 03:35 I've found that a cell size of 40 works quite well.
• 03:38 Our last stained glass filter gave the mosaic a lot of nice colors to work with.
• 03:42 That's why it was added in the first place.
• 03:45 Using a rectangular marquee tool,
• 03:46 make a selection around the top three rows of blocks.
• 03:49 These will primarily be changing to green.
• 03:51 Once they are selected, add a hue and
• 03:53 saturation adjustment layer from the bottom of your layers panel, and
• 03:57 change the blend mode of this adjustment layer to linear dodge.
• 04:01 Now, for the settings, I'm gonna set the hue to 80, the saturation to 55,
• 04:05 and the lightness I'm gonna keep at zero.
• 04:07 Now, if you've seen the Minecraft icon, it's not completely green at the top.
• 04:12 There are some brown blocks that poke through.
• 04:14 In your tools on the left, go ahead and grab the pencil tool, which should be
• 04:18 hiding with brush tool, and choose a square brush with a size of 40 pixels.
• 04:23 If you don't see square brushes in your list,
• 04:25 click the little arrow to the right and choose square brushes.
• 04:29 With that set, make sure you have the adjustment layers layer mask selected, and
• 04:33 start clicking on the blocks that you want to turn brown again.
• 04:37 It might be a good idea to zoom in so you can really see these blocks up close.
• 04:42 If you change your mind about a certain block or
• 04:43 you wanna add a few blocks below the three rows,
• 04:46 you can switch your brush over to white and paint those blocks back in.
• 04:49 There;s no specific design that you need to create, so have fun with it.
• 04:53 Once you're finished with these blocks,
• 04:55 there's one more adjustment that we need to add.
• 04:58 In your layers panel, command or control click on the layer mask, and
• 05:02 then go ahead and add a levels adjustment layer.
• 05:04 I'm gonna drag the highlight slider to the left, around 200,
• 05:07 the midtone slider to around 1.30, and the shadow slider to around 13.
• 05:12 This will brighten up the blocks just a touch.
• 05:15 Perfect, now you can either merge these three layers together or
• 05:18 stick them in the folder.
• 05:19 I'm gonna go ahead and select all these layers, hold down my shift key, and
• 05:23 click-on the new group icon to pop them in a folder all together.
• 05:27 Now, to mold them to the shape on the left that we created earlier, go ahead and
• 05:30 enter transform mode by going to edit and then click on free transform.
• 05:35 And then, with your command key on a Mac,
• 05:36 control key on a PC held down, drag the corner nodes of this texture to
• 05:40 the corners of the shape layer that we created earlier.
• 05:42 You'll probably notice that things snap really nicely into place.
• 05:46 That's another benefit of creating the shapes beforehand.
• 05:49 Once a texture is in place, press the return or
• 05:51 enter key on your keyboard to accept the transformation.
• 05:54 Now, from here, you can either duplicate the group and flip it horizontally or
• 05:58 you can create a new texture from scratch using the same process.
• 06:01 The advantage of creating a new texture is that the blocks won't be identical.
• 06:06 Because I just walked you through that process,
• 06:07 I'm not gonna waste time and do it again.
• 06:09 I've already got another texture ready to go.
• 06:12 The last step is to create the top texture.
• 06:14 We're going to use pretty much the same process.
• 06:16 Let's start by creating a new layer, and setting our colors.
• 06:20 The foreground color will be set to the darker of the greens, which will be 4E,
• 06:25 6E, 21, and the background color will be the lighter of the greens, 89, B9, 48.
• 06:33 Once again, grab the gradient tool from the left and
• 06:35 drag out a linear gradient from the top to the bottom.
• 06:39 With that done, head to filter, texture, stained glass.
• 06:42 And if you haven't used this filter since we created the brown blocks,
• 06:45 the settings should be stuck.
• 06:47 Press okay to accept the changes.
• 06:48 And once again head to filter, pixelate, mosaic and accept the changes.
• 06:54 Now, just like we did before, go ahead and enter free transform mode.
• 06:57 And using the command or control key, drag the corners of
• 07:00 our texture layer to the corners of the shape that we created earlier.
• 07:04 Perfect, we're just about finished.
• 07:06 From here, you can add additional adjustment layers to create more depth to
• 07:09 our shape.
• 07:10 I'm gonna add a levels adjustment layer to the texture on the right-hand side, and
• 07:14 drag the mid-tone slider a little bit to the right.
• 07:17 Good. And once last thing you
• 07:18 might wanna add is a sharpen filter.
• 07:20 Selecting your texture, head up to filter, down to sharpen, and then unsharp mask.
• 07:25 Go ahead and play around with the settings until you
• 07:26 can get a nice sharpness that you're happy with.
• 07:29 Apply this filter to all of your texture layers, and
• 07:31 from here it's completely up to you what you do with it

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