This is the first of a few RSS feed icons I am going to teach you how to create, I will add the others over the coming days and weeks. In this tutorial I am going to show you how to create this icon:

1. The first thing to do is download this feed image (to do so right click and select Save Image As… or something to the same effect):
   
2. Create a new file in the Gimp 125 x 125 pixels
3. Select “Open As Layers” from the File menu and find the RSS file that you just saved
4. Move the layer so that it looks like this:
   
5. Duplicate the rss image layer using the Duplicate button on the layers window
6. Select the layer menu and click Scale Layer and change the width and height to 40 pixels
7. Select the Drop Shadow option from the Light and Shadow menu on the Filters menu
8. Set the offsets to 0 and the blur radius to 5
9. You should now have something like this:
   
10. We will now create the reflection. To do this, duplicate both RSS image layers
11. On each of the new layers created, use the flip tool (shortcut: “Shift and P”) to flip the layers upside down, make sure that you set the tool to Verticle else it wont work.
12. Once you have done that move the layers down so that the top of the layer is touching the bottom of the main RSS image layer, like this:
    
13. Now choose the colour that you would like the background to be, this would be the background colour of the website or website element you might add this to. I am just going to use standard white (FFFFFF). Change the foreground of the colour switcher to your chosen colour.
14. Select the gradient tool (shortcut: “L”) and change the gradient option in the tool options area to FG to Transparent.
15. Now click and drag from half way all the way to the top of the upside down layers, this should create this effect:
    
16. And finally, change the upside down layers to opacity 20.0, which will create this:
    

There you have it, a simple yet very nice looking RSS icon, one thing that I forgot to add to the tutorial and would mean changing all the images in the tutorial if I was going to do this, is to reduce the opacity of the drop shadow on the smaller RSS image.

Come back soon for another RSS feed icon, I will be showing you how to create something like this: