HOW TO: Create your own Fancy Gravatar easily!

Gravatar, a service from Automattic Inc. is widely used in blogs all over the world, and even used in many CMS Systems, for giving the commenters a fancy look without uploading the same picture over and over again. Here's a full-featured tutorial to create you own Fancy Gravatar, that would make the world stare at you.

Step 1: Start off by creating a New Blank Document in Photoshop of dimensions, 128 x 128 pixels.

Step 2: Select the whole area, go to Layers-> Create Fill Layer->Solid Fill. Choose the color, by specifying the hex code, #1C9FEA or any colour you wish.

Step 3: Select the whole area again, and create a normal layer, by Layers->Create Layer. Choose Layer Mode as Soft Light.

Step 4: Pick the Brush Tool, and choose a brush size of 100. Pick the white colour from the palette and make a brush stroke in the middle in the document (click once). Now set the Opacity of the layer to 55%.

 Step 5: Now go to Start-> All Programs->  Accessories-> System Tools-> Character Map. In the Character Map window choose the letters on your name in the fancy style, select them and copy them by the options available within the Character Map window. Now in Photoshop, pick the text tool, set your text size, and put the selected letters in your document, and adjust them in the middle position. Choose the text colour to #1E1E1E or any dark colour you may wish.

Step 6: Open the Blending Options for the text layer, by making a Right Click on the text layer and choosing Blending Options. In the Blending Options window, select Inner Shadow and tick the checkbox to activate it. You will see that the text has a cool effect on it.

Step 7: Now select the Stroke option, tick the checkbox to activate it, and set the stroke size to 1px and stroke colour to #1A1A1A or any dark colour that you may wish. Click OK on the Blending Options window to set the effect to the text.

Step 8: Pick the Eclipse tool from the toolbar and make a selection diagonally within the document. Choose the colour of the fill to White (#FFFFFF).

Step 9: Now set the Opacity of the selection fill to 13%, so as to make a glossy effect on your Gravatar. Your Gravatar should be ready, Save the document as .JPG and enjoy your Gravatar, put it on your Gravatar account and show it everywhere you comment. You can make other cool effects to your Gravatar by adding extra layers. Your Gravatar should look like this:

Here's another Gravatar made using the same technique: