What if I want to add new icons?

In my recent post about mapping land parcels for the fire department, I mentioned I changed some existing icons, but I didn’t go into much detail about how I did it. I started by finding free icons on the Internet through a Google search. Next, my quandary was what format they need to be in and what size. 

In researching this I discovered the existing Depiction icons were in .PNG format but didn’t find much info about size. So I checked with the folks at Depiction about the existing icon files and they provided me with a full set of the files (about 1mb worth of data). Because these icons all have a similar look and style, they look much better than many of the icons I downloaded, so I decided that I would use these instead. (They have now made the source icons available for download.)

Now the question was how to modify them. For my existing project, I needed four new icons: two residences of different colors and two vacant land icons of different color. I have used Photoshop and other photo manipulation software before and so I started to look for free software that might be easier to use. I found two: GIMP , which is an open source photo manipulation software and Sib Icon Editor. Both of these are free software. I ended up using Gimp for this particular need. 

So I started Gimp. They have a selection by color feature, so I selected the blue color of the original icon, filled it with green and saved it. Then, I did it again and filled it with red and saved it. Now I had two new icons to use that were of the same quality as the other Depiction icons. 
 
Next, I decided that I would use the shape icon for vacant land.
The shape icon required a couple of extra steps, because if I just changed the orange line to a different color it wouldn’t show up very well. So, I changed the outer black to the color I wanted and changed the yellow shape to black.
 
To use these new icons, I selected the “home” icon and added one to my depiction. Then I right clicked on it and selected “View Properties”.
 
I chose the “Set Icon” option, selected from file, browsed to my folder where I saved the icon and then chose the file and then selected “OK”. 
 

Then I right clicked on the icon selected the home element from the list and clicked on it and then chose “Save Element to my Library”. Now when I add and element, I can see my new elements with their new icons.