kingstoken | Snowflake Challenge Day #5

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of ice covered tree branches and falling snowflakes on a blue background. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

Challenge #5

In your own space, tell us about 3 creative/fannish resources, spaces, or communities you use or enjoy.

Okay, I am going to give you some resources if you are interested in making icons or graphics. The majority of the resources I am going to share are for photoshop, because that is what I am most familiar with, some of them you can also use on other services but you'll have to check.

First off, I would like to recommend the community

icon_resources it doesn't get a lot of traffic, but every once and awhile people will drop off links to free texture packs (i.e. backgrounds or overlays) that you can use for your icons, you can also find a few of my own texture packs over there as well.

Secondly, if you have ever seen icons with fancy swirly or circle text like this one of mine:

and wondered how they did that, there is a great tutorial here that takes you through the steps.

If you have ever wanted to just make photos prettier, maybe give them a little more colour or vibrancy, there are nice free LUTs here, the vlog says they are for videos, but I have used them for still photos and they have turned out great, Pastry Wonderland is annoying in that it almost always makes pictures look better.

I really like these free torn paper brushes that can be used for a nice tear away effect. I used them on this cover art, which I think turned out really well. There are lots of free brushes and other resources on Deviantart, but sometimes you have to really go digging for them.

If you are interested in making graphics with photoshop there are lots of tutorials on YouTube, I follow quite a few channels, but I highly recommend Blue Lightning TV, he takes his time and goes though the process step by step, which is great if you are following along.

If you read this and thought "that's great kingstoken, but I don't have photoshop" may I also suggest the free version of Canva, it has lots of free plug and play templates (if it doesn't have a $ in the corner it's free), including bingo cards, I made this year's book bingo card with Canva. They also have book covers, so if you have ever wanted to make a cover for your fic here is an easy way to do that, here is an example of a fic cover I made with Canva awhile ago.

One last thing if you are looking for royalty free stock photos for your fic covers, moodboards, or icons I highly recommend Unsplash, they have 1000s of beautiful photos and most of them are free to use for non-commercial projects (the ones you have to pay for have watermarks across them, so just ignore those ones). The photo I use in my example fic cover was from Unsplash.

I hope this was helpful!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

A lot of this was new to me, thank you!

Re: icons, do you know of any other tutorials I could have a read of? I kind of missed the boat with icon making in my LJ days and it's something I would like to get better at.

I don;t have a lot, but if you here https://icontalking.dreamwidth.org/tag/ask+the+maker to the ask the maker tag at icontalking you will find links to different tutorials for making different types of icons. I hope that helps!

Thanks again!

Butting in here a bit, but

tinyumbrella has a great set of intro tuts here, and the tips & tuts tag at

smallbatchicons has some stuff as well.

Thank you! I will go and bookmark now :D

Thank you for the info

You're welcome!

That torn paper brushes look great! I had no idea that you could make bingo cards on Canva so I appreciate that info. Thanks for sharing! :D

You're welcome! I didn't know about the bingo cards on Canva til last year when my regular bingo card site was giving me issues, it has really come in handy.