First Spell Icons

These are the first spell icons that I've ever made... They probably aren't that great, but... here they are. Can you give me comments and criticism? BTW, if you like them, you can use them.

You will notice that the 3 on the first row and the third row are all the same concept. For those, can you tell me which one looks the best?

Icons: (by row, left to right)
1. Far sight (v1)
2. Far sight (v2)
3. Far sight (v3)
4. Incineration
5. Lightning
6. Blink
7. Fireball (v1)
8. Fireball (v2)
9. Fireball (v3)
10. Critical strike
11. Immolation
12. Flame strike

They are really nice for first icons. Keep up the work and make them a bit easier and clearer. :ggani:

Oh, perhaps I should clarify a bit too. These are the first ones I've made from scratch. I've done recolors and c'n'p stuff before. While some of them look nice, none of them really deserve to be posted, because they took no skill to make. (oh yeah, I did these with a laptop touchpad.... yuck.)

Number 2 is really nice, others are mediocore, but still made free hand. Most of them don't look much like wc3 theme...and the border is a bit off :)

Otherwise, great job, first time I'd say...AWESOME job :)

I know they are freehand but the fact that u did it with the laptop mouse impresses me even more. :D

There's nothing wrong with C&P in principle, as long as it doesn't make the skin/icon/model/whatever look ripped and just like the original. In this case, for example, you'd have been much better off copying the border from the original Blizzard icons and placing them on top of your images.

Your borders are ok, but when you have a couple of icons right next to each other in the unit menu an icon with a different border will stick out like a sore thumb. The same is true in general for all kinds of graphics that's different in style from the rather cartoony style of wc3. For this reason most of those icons wouldn't really look that good in wc3. The ones I like best are the 3rd and the 10th, since they approach Blizzards cartoony style somewhat.

I'm not saying those are bad icons graphic wise, but if you want to make icons that fit into wc3 well you should study and try to emulate the artists who made the original graphics.

It also looks like you're still relying on filters and stuff like that to a large extent. That's understandable since such techniques help beginning artists to make some decent effects early on, but you really don't want to get used to them while learning, or all your art will start to look too similar and you'll get lazy. Kinda like how math teachers don't let you use a calculator most of the time.. :) If you're used to not having to work for simple things, the complicated stuff not achievable with filters and effects will seem impossible.

Anyways, really not bad for a first try. Keep it up.

EDIT: Confusing typos.

i like the blink icon it looks pretty cool
they all sorta look cartoony though make em look more similar to the w3 icons

Thanks for the comments. I'd just like to say, though, that I actually didn't do too much filter work, besides occasional Polar->Rectangular and Rectangular->Polar coordinate twiddling, and lense flares. A few of them came from shrunk down backgrounds that I made (#1 and the background of the blink icon)

Here is the background that I used for number 1. I made it in about... oh... 45 minutes.