This icon was made in Photoshop CS2 but it should work in newer versions as well. Resources in this tutorial have been credited on this page if they are not my own. If you found this tutorial useful, credit would be appreciated.

I was inspired to create some icons of crowns/tiaras after my host Kya posted a bunch at her icon stash. This tutorial is rather simple and uses several resources made by me. All the bokeh textures are less than 20 KB in file size.

• a purple-yellow gradient (~289 KB)
• purple bokeh light texture
• another purple bokeh light texture
• blue & yellow bokeh light texture
• multi-coloured bokeh light texture
• orange bokeh light texture
• rainbow bokeh light texture

Note that you don’t need everything in this list! The must-haves are the gradient and at least one texture. You choose which ones you like and I’ll walk you through the basics.

I stress that you must credit me when using the above resources – just a link back to Heartdrops.org somewhere on your website saying “thanks for the icon tutorial/textures” is fine. Please don’t claim the resources as your own. (The third, fourth and fifth textures were not made by me; they were from a website named Fulfilled, I believe. If you have the URL to this website please provide me with it so I can appropriately credit.)

Start by pasting your image onto a new canvas. Crop and resize so that your image is 100 by 100 pixels. You can find images at Flickr.com and perform an advanced search on Creative Commons-licensed content (which means you are free to use the images and modify them). Searches on other websites will also work, with the keywords “jewellery”, “tiara”, “crown”, “accessory” or appropriate combinations of them. I’ll be using one image as an example, which is from photos8.com

The next step uses the gradient. If you want to, you can crop the gradient to a 100 by 100 square, and paste it as a new layer, or you can paste it on top of your work and drag it around. It’s rather large, though!

Set the blending options of the layer to Soft Light at 100% opacity. You can do this by double-clicking the layer preview in the side panel, or going to Layer > Layer Style > Blending options.

For the next layer I have used one of the purple bokeh textures. Paste it onto a new layer and set the blending options to Screen. You can fiddle with the opacity as is necessary; this all depends on your image.

It looks fine now but to give it a more heavenly effect, I am using the other purple bokeh texture at approximately the same opacity as the last layer. Remember that you are free to fiddle with this as much as you need or want.

That is where I’m ending my icon. Here are a bunch of other icons I’ve created using some of the textures I’ve provided in different combinations.

Image credits: The London Season · Carmel’s Collection · Longest List… · Shutterstock · Flickr.

This icon tutorial is really simple; you can use other coloured gradients to achieve the same effect. Most bokeh textures will work; it’s just a matter of fiddling with the opacity settings and using the right one for the image you’re using.