I want to make a graphic for a character I have in an online game. Since the requirements have blocked me I was hoping someone here could help. My theme is "Magic and Metal". My character is a Magical character and my group memebers all use weapons, thus the theme. The problem is that the icon has to be 24x24, which is really small. Im having trouble getting an image that small to look good. If anyone can help Id be very grateful!

Do you have the image already made? if so how big is it..

No, every image I try gets distorted once I size it down.

because the size is so small you could try to draw it yourself.

Well Im not as talented in that department, im a photography nut. I want my icon to so look a star filled sky with hues of purple...and for the metal part maybe a sword piercing a star. I don't know...im stupped!

Reducing anything to that small is problematic at best. First of all, if its being distorted, it's because you're trying to resize a rectangular original into a square final image. Something gets squished in the process. Crop your original so that it's perfectly square first, then reduce it to 24x24. Photoshop or Photoshop Elements does a pretty decent job at the reduction process. I haven't really tried many other programs on this. Another thing you can do is to turn the image from RGB format into an indexed image and reduce the number of colors (say to 64 or 32) and then reduce it. This sometimes will give you a crisper final graphic.