I was trying to picture hunting and thought that it would look cool to draw an eagle trying to grab Artis Navi logo as his prey. Hope you guys enjoy this bigger case study and get something out of it. Let me know or don’t ;) Grab the wallpaper here.
Right – let’s get rolling! Started from sketch of an eagle – now this image started as one with the Artis Navi Lion wallpaper but then I thought it didn’t work so I dropped the eagle, but since it took some getting made I didn’t want to bin it. I went for classic side head view.
Continued working on the body sketching some wings, basic feathers and claws. Used few images as reference to make sure that I don’t end up with a crow which I did few times;-)
Happy with the basic shape I started some shading on the head and front part of “da” bird.
At this point I started adding and sketching in the logo to check how it looks and what lay out to use.
Dropped the logo for now and focused on shading the wings and back-end of the eagle. The tail and head got some white and the rest of the body more black-grey look.
Working on this bit got me thinking and I wanted to go with a silver-grey look but I tried with colours and it actually worked nicely so I decided to go with classy eagle colours which I reference from few google images.
The bird looks cool – continued working on the shading and started to work with mixer-brush from Photoshop CS5 – I must say – this brush ain’t good for paining as I can’t predict and control it properly, but it works great as blender – get get some nice and funky results. I did get similar (the same?) results in older versions of Photoshop with the smudge tool.
The bird is all cool for now – lets think about the background – got some nice photo that I thought it looks interesting – obviously the bird is brown and I don’t want the grey sky – I want something that will work with the bird and look “optimistic”.
Lets zoom in and have a quick look what I did with the clouds. Now it looks cool, but the birds is a drawing – the clouds are not. So lets make it come (no funny associations here) together.
Started from smoothing the texture as the painted background should have less details – so that it won’t distract from the main subject, but also – so it fits with the style. Used surface blur and mixer-brush to get the nice pain-like look. Try to keep the strokes random – yet make sure that it fallow natural flow the photo curves.
I want something optimistic and I think this shade will work – used some overlay layers to added the colours and some adjustment layers to get the proper feel and shade.
Added the bird into the image (plus the repainted logo) – yeah – I like this – painted some nice yellow sunrise like shapes to get some sweet transition from the violets into the brown bird and yellow is perfect for this.
Last step is always in my case the longest one – in terms on work as I paint in all the details (mainly on the bird like the fine feather and more details on the head). Re-pained the logo in glowing red-yellow with some flames (some stock imagery). Some more tweaking to get the final look with adjustment layers to blend all the elements. Voil – hope you guys enjoy this.
Grab the wallpaper here. Cu next time.
About the author of this article.
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Adam Spizak
Adam is an illustrator and designer with almost 13 years of experience in both online and print design. His main inspiration comes from music and books.
You can find more information at www.spizak.com and by following his Twitter.
3 Comments
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This is very cool. Thank you for showing the process. How long did this take you to complete?
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thanks a lot, hope you enjoy the wallpaper as well.
The eagle took around a day – the same with the background. i would say around 2.5-3 days for the whole thing.
thanks again.
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I’m still learning from you, as I’m trying to reach my goals. I definitely love reading all that is written on your blog.Keep the aarticles coming. I enjoyed it
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