Illustrator nut, gaming geek and professional artist.
Hummingbird & Cactus Flower
Description I have been working on this off and on for over a year now. I call it my glorified scrapbook experiment. I gave up on it several times. I initially started by creating a gradient mesh of the flower but it looked too photographic for my tastes. I ended up creating vector images from several different photos and composed them into one composite scene.
The flower and humming bird were taken from a scanned photo from Birds and Blooms magazine (Aug 2003 credit Anthony Mercieca). I edited/cropped/trimmed the images in Photoshop to make them easier to live trace. For the hummingbird I cut him up into four separate pieces (front and back wings, body and tail). I did that so I could apply separate shadows to the hummingbird body. I didn’t like the original cactus the flower was attached to so I found a different public domain picture of a similar cactus. I then used some custom Live Trace settings on each piece and then converted them to a live paint object so I could adjust colors and put them together. The green chives were hand drawn and the pink flowers were 3 different flower symbols I created (copied and scaled as needed).
I found a photo of a window in a set of game level textures that I’ve used previously in my Quake 3 game levels from BerneyBoy (http://berneyboy.planetquake.gamespy.com/textures.htm). These are great set of textures! I also used a modified image from that texture pack to create the background with live trace. With simple blurs of vector paths I added inner shadows to the window to give it more depth. The planter box was another photo I found in a magazine and scanned.
Several masks were used on the cactus, hummingbird and chives to confine shadows to objects and not the background. That was a major pain but worth the work. Background shadows were done manually with simple blurs.
I wanted to create a painterly look using Illustrator. There are still some things I think I could do better in Photoshop but my goal was to do the majority of this in Illustrator. One major drawback of converting complex objects to Live Paint objects is the huge amount of memory it uses. This drawing crashed many times causing me to pull most of my gray hairs out. I know some might complain that this is a Photoshop piece but it’s 90 percent vector work with the 10 percent Photoshop work just used for cutting out the images.
Application Illustrator
Labels Fine Art
Times Viewed 3793
Approved By toddm
15 November 2006 - 02:02
Conversation With
Todd Macadangdang (toddm)
Wow. And geeze, the description is as wonderful as the image! Love the painterly look, Bravo.
15 November 2006 - 08:56:
Jerry Mills (Husker)
replied...
Thanks Todd!
15 November 2006 - 02:18
Conversation With
jon (lilypad)
BE-A-UTIFUL work Jerry. And I love the very informative descriptin.
- jon
15 November 2006 - 08:57:
Jerry Mills (Husker)
replied...
Thanks Jon. I think the headaches were worth it. ;)
15 November 2006 - 03:46
Conversation With
Dan Leventhal (DanLeventhal)
Wow, I'd say you got the look you were going for, it's got real texture to it! I think we've all got that one project that's been causing our computer to implode for eleven months or so, it's inspiring to see you finished yours =)
15 November 2006 - 09:06:
Jerry Mills (Husker)
replied...
Heh, yeah this was one of those that dares you to give up. ;)
15 November 2006 - 18:08
Conversation With
Dirk Murset (voodoodog)
Jerry,
WOW! 90% vectors, you say? Holy smokes, that is bee-yoo-tiff-ul, no tiff-pun intened. Went to that site to checkout some new textures to use in my Photoshop projects, but had some trouble finding where exactly to go to download the textures. Anyway, great work. A big, fat BRAVO!
15 November 2006 - 19:50:
Jerry Mills (Husker)
replied...
Thanks a lot man. Coming from guys like you means a lot. FYI you can download those Photorealistic textures from http://www.fileplanet.com/dl.aspx?/planetquake/berneyboy/photorealistic.zip
It requires a free account signup but they are worth it.
15 November 2006 - 19:56:
Jerry Mills (Husker)
replied...
FYI: you can view the wireframe in the scraps section of my Deviant Art page:
http://jerrydmills.deviantart.com/
15 November 2006 - 20:06:
Dirk Murset (voodoodog)
replied...
Jer,
Thanx a bunch! Signed-up and ready to download. I'm always looking for new textures and styles to use in Photoshop. Once again, great piece and muchas gracias!
15 November 2006 - 20:13:
Jerry Mills (Husker)
replied...
Yer welcome Dirk! I think I'm going to change gears next and try my hand at a 56 Cadillac (another piece I shelved).
Thanks Todd!