If there’s a word balloon in the section you want to make into an icon, you have a few options: you can remove it, you can remove the text, or you can just leave it as is. The last one is usually not a great option, because often the text is too small to read (or there’s just way too much text). I’ll show two ways to include the text or balloon in a later tutorial. Today, we’re going to cover removing it.
Here’s the panel I want to make into an icon, from Captain Britain #5. This is already cropped and color corrected (I think I just hit Auto Tone to get rid of the fading).
First, I sampled the dark magenta color and then, on a new layer, painted over the thought balloons with a brush set to 80% hardness. I rarely use 100% hardness, because I think having just a little bit of feathering usually helps it blend in better.
Next I touched up the blacks, mostly on his hands. I try not to get too into the weeds with it, by constantly zooming out to approximately the final size to see if it even needs anything. I used a brush with 60% opacity and 50% hardness so it’d blend in.
I fixed the shoulder that was covered by the thought balloon and then copied in focus lines from a different panel a few pages later. Unfortunately that page was blue so I had to adjust the color to match as best I could.
I cloned the texture from below his arm to the space above his shoulder to help match better.
I wasn’t quite able to match some of the colors, so I painted over the dark magenta on a new layer with 80% hardness brush to blend in (so I don’t have be precise around the existing art) and set the layer to Color. I also cropped it a bit closer and, of course, to a square.
It’s not perfect, but it looks good at 100px. I decided it needed more of a vignette effect, so I pulled a frame texture from my files, removed it from the figure, and generally messed with it.
Last step was, of course, to resize, so here’s the result.
Another option is to just paint out the text, so here’s that.
Still from Captain Britain #5. On the left is one of Brian’s professors and on the right, smoking, is Chief Inspector Dai Thomas from Scotland Yard. I very simply paint white over the text. Fortunately, this panel was simple. Some of the older comics are more difficult because of paper yellowing and heavy texture, although generally at 100 pixels, you can fudge a lot.
And at icon size it looks like this:
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