This is the new icon and logo artwork that I created for Paint.NET v3.0. I made it back in May 2006 using a combination of Paint.NET v2.6 and a very early, half-broken build of v3.0 (heh). The brush was authored separately and then imported, and was originally an 18-layer 2048x2048 pixel image. I experimented with having a shwoopy "reflection" on the top portion of the image, but ultimatedly decided against it.

The image that is in the icon is cropped from the top-right of a photograph I took up at Snoqualmie ski resort: [link] . It was then fed through the Oil Painting effect and some other adjustments were applied.

One of the goals with this was to have icon and logo artwork that was original, and that was available and useful for a wide variety of purposes. The old icon was only 128x128 pixels and thus could not be used very well in at least 2 scenarios: print (e.g., magazine), and Windows Vista (which wants 256x256 pixel icons). It also limited the size at which a full logo (which includes the "paint.net" name) could be authored at. Since I authored the icon portion of this logo at 2048x2048 pixels, I think I'm safe there for quite awhile

I think total time to create this was 30 hours.

Oh yeah, if you're interested be sure to download the full-size version. It's 4844 x 1216 pixels (the "full view" here is set to only 1600 pixels wide). I originally tried to upload this with a transparent background (yay for PNG), but apparently deviantArt doesn't handle that very well and put a black background behind it. If you want the transparent background instead of the white background, you can find links on the Paint.NET forum in the Pictorium topic: [link]