Step by step instructions on how make a simple icon

Icons on IMVu are the small pictures we see of products when we search the catalogue, they are a real art and something that is increasing in quality every year.

In this tutorial I'm going to show you how to make a basic icon, nothing fancy or funky just a basic product icon so you can get your products published.

I'm presuming for this that you have Windows 7 installed on your pc

Windows has its own built in image editor program and its called Paint.

Click on the start button on your Windows desktop, bottom left corner and in the search box type in Paint. This should show an icon that you can click on to open Paint, it can also be found in the Accessories folder of your windows programs.

What I want you to do is find paint, open it and minimise it so we can come back to it later

I suggest you make your icon when your making your product put some clothes on to complement the product your making, take of anything that's not necessary

For the purposes of this tutorial I'm going to use these earrings

http://www.imvu.com/shop/product.php?products_id=6860800

I clicked derive on them, and changed my outfit

What you do is just get a clear view on your screen of the product, get as close as you can and then to take the picture press the Print Screen key, its usually at the top of your keyboard next to the F12 key

Go to the Windows Paint program now and press Paste, this should paste the picture you just took

Now Click on the select tool and select the area of the picture that you want to use for your icon, make it slightly rectangular and once you have selected it then click on the Crop button

Paste / Select

and crop

 

Now we need to resize this picture so we can use in the catalogue. Icons must be 100 pixels wide and 80 pixels high

This is the hardest part, click on the resize button and pay attention :P

When we resize we need to change a few default settings. Make sure pixels is selected, Make sure that maintain aspect ratio is UnTicked. Then the horizontal size needs to be 100 and the vertical is 80 once you have done this click ok, and now your icon should be sized correctly Now you just need to save it Click on the folder in the top lefthand corner and select " Save as ", for icons I would tend to use .png format though .jpg will do too select either That it you should now have your icon