Designing a fresh new image having the famous "aqua" effect is easier than you think - if you use proper tools. To create an image from scratch, a professional, small and simple icon software such as IconLover 5 is all you really need. IconLover is available here: aha-soft.com

For example, let us make an aqua-style icon to represent "Add", a glass ball with a "plus" sign in it. First, you'll need to draw a circle of a chosen color. Pick the color from the Color properties menu. Just so you know, you can always memorize a color by adding it to Custom Colors; this comes really handy if you need to draw a matching set of icon images.

With the Transparency bar or with one of the Transparency presets, define your new icon's opacity. For this tutorial, the ball has to be fully opaque. Similarly, you can set background color; for simplicity's sake, we'll keep the background transparent for now.

To make a circle of your chosen color, select the Filled Ellipse tool by clicking the Filled Ellipse icon in the Tools menu, which is on the left of the drawing area. Holding the left mouse button down, move the mouse within the drawing area to draw an ellipse. The ellipse changes its size and shape as you move the mouse. To create a perfectly round circle, hold Shift while drawing. That's it, you have just drawn a circle!

To add volume and dimension to the flat circle, we'll need to add some special effects. There are tons of those built into IconLover! You can add shadows, gradients, transparency masks, and of course, the famous 'glass reflection' look employed by the aqua effect.

To make an icon matching Apple's Aqua style, you'll need to add a reflection and a shadow to the circle. This can be done quite easily altogether by simply selecting Aqua from the Effects menu. Keep all sliders and values at their defaults for now, and you'll get a beautiful shiny sphere as a result.

Now let's have some fun and make your icon truly unique. Go back to that Aqua dialog and have a carefull look at the properties. There are plenty of values available to tweak, allowing you to create something never seen before. Go ahead and tweak the sliders to see how your icon can look!

As a final touch, let's add some dimension to your newly created icon. While glowing and shiny, it still looks like a lens rather than a crystal ball. Let's fix that by adding a drop-down shadow! To apply a shadow effect to the icon, click "Drop shadow" from the Effects menu. You can stick to defaults, or move the settings around to get a flat button, a lens, or a ball. The effect depends on the size of the shadow, its distance from the subject, and the angle at which it falls to the ground.

To embed the 'plus' sign into the icon, click on the Text tool icon in the left Tools menu or press "T" to open the text properties window. Make sure the "Image transparency" box is ticked. This means that your text will not be transparent, only the area around it will be. Tweaking the "Use semi-transparency" setting assigns your text the same level of transparency your primary color has. Type "+", and you'll get the 'plus' sign inserted into the ball.

Voila! You've just drawn a crystal ball that appears to be in the famous Aqua style! All you needed was a professional icon software, IconLover 5, a few mouse clicks and a couple of minutes of your time. Easy!

IconLover is located at aha-soft.com