How To Paint A Bird Of Prey

• Software: GIMP or Photoshop
• Hardware: Wacom Intuos3
• Level: Intermediate
• Subject: Bird Of Prey

In this tutorial, you will see how you can do a digital painting of a bird of prey (similar to eagle) using GIMP or Photoshop or similar software. For this particular work, I used Photoshop Elements, but it can be easily reproduced in other software.

Construction and Line Art

Start of by blocking out the basic shapes in a layer. Then start sketching the line art on a layer above it, while making the lower layer partially transparent to turn the earlier drawn lines to gray. (Read You Too Can Sketch if you need details on this approach).

After you have a clean line art, you can delete the layer containing construction lines or hide it.

Base Color Tones

In a layer below the line art, apply the basic color tones using a hard brush. Do not worry much about staying within the outline – but do keep in mind the internal boundary like the beak.

Assume a light direction and then layout the different color ranges on the same color layers, so that you can easily pick them up using the eyedropper tool.

Paint the rough areas of the different shades keeping in mind the direction of light.

Basic Shading

Now is the time to switch on the pressure sensitivity of the tablet. If you are using mouse, it is still doable – just use a semi-transparent brush.

If required, do not hesitate to choose a darker tone. Do not bother much about the texture of the plumage, but do keep your brush strokes along the flow of the feathers.

Merge Line Art

To make the artwork look less like a cartoon, but still keep the painterly/sketchy feel, merge the line art layer onto the color layer. To do this, convert the layer mode of the Line Art layer to Overlay and bring down the opacity to 75% (that is, 25% transparent) – around that range.

After that, merge the two layers.

Use the eraser to clean up the extra strokes of color and maintain a little bit of the overlayed line art.

Detailing

Go in and start detailing.

Use a semi hard brush and start applying strong hightlights and ocassional shadows to enhance the highlights. Keep changing the brush size a bit.

Use a similar approach to the shadow area. You do not need to zoom in and detail every bit of the feather. You just need to get the ‘likeness’ of the plumage/feathers.

Finalize

You will need to go over the entire artwork once you are done detailing. Add the highlights and other details to the eye. Apply few odd strokes to show the ruffled feathers.

You can see a larger view at the deviantART entry to study the finer details.

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