Cheese Head, Block Face, Squarely these are some of the names our user used to associate with Hiitch emoticons. Well, today I’m going to show you how to create your own cheese head, block face and squarely emoticons.

Before I begin, I would like you to download the emoticon package. Inside this package contain the eyes and heads of Hiitch emoticon to get you started quickly.

For this tutorial, I’m going to show you how “Silly” is done.

Step 1:

Open a 23px by 23px transparent background with your favourite image editing tools. I’m using adobe photoshop for this example.

Unzip the emoticon package and open “cube_head1.png”. Select the head (Ctrl+A) and copy and paste it to the transparent background. Name this layer “head”.

Step 2:

Open “eyes1.png” in the package, select the eyes (Ctrl+A) and copy and paste it to the transparent background. Move this layer on top of the “head” layer as shown below. Shift the eyes until you are happy with its position.

Step 3:

Now to draw the pupil and eyebrows of the emoticon.
Choose the rectangular marquee tool and draw a 2px by 2px square. Then create a new layer “left pupil” and fill the rectangular marquee with dark grey #3F3F3F. Deselect (Ctrl+D) the marquee and shift the pupil to the lower left corner of the eyes.

Duplicate the “left pupil” layer and rename this layer “right pupil”. Shift the right pupil to the top right corner of the eyes as shown below.

The eyebrows for “Silly” is drawn using a 1px pencil tool . Create a new layer “eyebrows” and draw 4 black dots as shown below.

Step 4:

To accentuate the expression of the emoticon, I’m going to give it a rosy cheek and add some freckles to the face.
Create a new layer “cheek 1″. Using the elliptical marquee tool , draw a circle on the left side of the face and fill it with light pink #F5AFAE. Then deselect it and apply a Gaussian blur of radius 1.5 to the cheek. Change the blending mode to “Linear Burn”.

Create another layer “cheek 2″ above “cheek 1″. Using the elliptical marquee tool, draw a similar circle but this time fill it with light yellow #F6C668. Apply a Gaussian blur of radius 1.5 and change the blending mode to “Linear Burn”. Reduce the opacity of “cheek 2 “to 30%.

For the freckles, I use a brown colour 1-2px soft brush to paint across the bottom of the eyes.

Step 5:

Finally, we will add in the mouth/lips for the emoticon. For “Silly” I used a polygonal lasso tool to draw out the mouth. After I am satisfy with the shape, I used dark red #680000 to fill it.

There you have it, your own cheese head or whatever you called it emoticon. You can save your final result as .png file.

I hoped you enjoy this tutorial, feel free to send me your creation at cbsoh[at]hiitch[dot]com. If we like your emoticons alot, we may just include it in our next Hiitch release. Ciao for now