What's your current main fandom? I feel like I should know, but I don't think I've seen you post about it ...
I think one of the main difficulty in icon making is that it's almost impossible to make a good icon without using the lasso tool (this thing) to separate your subject from the background. The only icon of the ones above that I didn't do that with is #6, and you can tell--it's not particularly well-lit, and the subject is hard to make out. For me, that icon was mostly an experiment, but I'd say it failed. ;)
The idea is to crop out your subject (usually a person, or a face; in #5 above it was Bill, Twelve, and the desk) and then either stick it onto a new background and blend the two, or to use filters like brightness, levels, curves, etc to change the lighting and colors of the subject and the background to create a good icon-look.
If I were you, I'd go and look for general GIMP tutorials on cropping with the lasso tool, on working with multiple layers, on blending modes (aka layer modes), color and lighting filters, and color and image correction tools such as levels, color balance, curves, and saturation adjustment. Sounds like a lot, but once you know your way around those tools, you should have no trouble getting into icon making--which is kind of an art of its own, because graphic design rarely requires you to work on a tiny 100x100 pixel canvas. So most fandom tutorials don't deal with graphic design basics, and more with "okay so how do I make tiny images look good?".
Good luck! If you want more info, check out the art tutorial tag on tinny's journal. She knows a lot more about icon making than I do.
no subject
I think one of the main difficulty in icon making is that it's almost impossible to make a good icon without using the lasso tool (this thing) to separate your subject from the background. The only icon of the ones above that I didn't do that with is #6, and you can tell--it's not particularly well-lit, and the subject is hard to make out. For me, that icon was mostly an experiment, but I'd say it failed. ;)
The idea is to crop out your subject (usually a person, or a face; in #5 above it was Bill, Twelve, and the desk) and then either stick it onto a new background and blend the two, or to use filters like brightness, levels, curves, etc to change the lighting and colors of the subject and the background to create a good icon-look.
If I were you, I'd go and look for general GIMP tutorials on cropping with the lasso tool, on working with multiple layers, on blending modes (aka layer modes), color and lighting filters, and color and image correction tools such as levels, color balance, curves, and saturation adjustment. Sounds like a lot, but once you know your way around those tools, you should have no trouble getting into icon making--which is kind of an art of its own, because graphic design rarely requires you to work on a tiny 100x100 pixel canvas. So most fandom tutorials don't deal with graphic design basics, and more with "okay so how do I make tiny images look good?".
Good luck! If you want more info, check out the art tutorial tag on