After a whole day spent (well, actually, it was not a whole day…) with creating an Echo icon for Applications Science I finally created a 48×48 variant, smaller sizes hopefully will be faster, but that I leave for tommorow. What’s so long on this? Shortly, everything. Now the long variant. I wanted to use same shape that is used by the gnome icon theme:
but that has some issues. Firstly, I need to create an isometric perspective icon and in case of bulbs it proved harder than usual, but that was actually one of the easiest thing on this icon. Next, the bulbs are created from glass. Gee, I don’t recall any Echo icon using glass as a material. Actually, glass is one of the hardest materials to visualise, it is both transparent and reflective… So, the question was, how to make an echo-styled glass. After some tries I came to a conclusion that I’ll use the Metalic colours (quite common for echo icons) and use mask for transparency setting (because the lightning gradient has highlight on different position than transparency gradient).
That has one drawback I discovered too late. It seems an inkscape bug, but as I has rawhide installed I sought for a workaround. The problem is that inkscape on all tries exported the png with white background instead of transparent! And workaround? Open in gimp and save there. But it has another problem – the shadows are a little offset. This is however rather easy to work around. Just let gimp render the svg bigger and then down scale it. You will loose nothing from the quality and will have nice more than 8x antialiasing…
Ok, so the bulbs I draw with semitransparent back sides in metalic colours and for front sides I used simple white transparent gradient. Actually I came to conclusion to do it this way after playing with a real light bulb for about a five minutes…
Now how about the liquid inside. Looking at a bottle with watter I though it would be solid, with a highlight where its surface touches the bulb. Actually I added one more highlight to the surface, reflecting the lightning which comes from the top. Because the liquid is below the front side of the bulb the gradient from glass nicely changes the visual style of the liquid inside as well.
The last things are shadows. That was one of the easier parts. Just drop shadow on ground and on other bulbs and I am set. And here is the 48×48 result (more sizes will come probably tommorow):
UPDATE: As I expected the optimizations for smaller sizes took far less time. The 16×16 icon is edited directly from relevant gnome icon. Here is the complete set:
