Design an Awesome Abstract Style Flaming Bird in Photoshop

Posted on February 8th, 2009 under Abstracts, Drawing, it has 31 Comments and 25,343 Views so far.

In this tutorial, I will show you the processes I used to design a really cool, abstract style flaming bird in Photoshop. This bird is created purely based on brush and filter effects in Photoshop, without the use of any third party images!

Along the way, we will learn how to load customized brushes, the use the various filters effect and image adjustments tools. Some techniques used in the tutorial could be a bit tricky. Have a try and see how your image turns out :)

Here is a preview of the final image: (click to enlarge)

An alternative version with shining effect:

Ok let’s get started!

Step 1

Create a new document in Photoshop with a size of your choice. I chose 1200 x 800 px because that’s size fit my monitor the best.

Firstly we tackle the bird’s wing. We need a customized brush to draw the fundation of the wing. Donwload a copy of this brushset from qbrushes.com and load it into Photoshop. If you’re a beginner in Photoshop and not sure how to do so, here is a handy tutorial showing how to load brushes into Photoshop.

Fill the background layer with Black Colour and create a new layer called “wing”. Use the following brush and make a single click on the “wing” layer:

1-brush

1-paint

Step 2

Still on “wing” layer, go to Filter > Distort > Twirl and apply the following settings:

2-twirl

Then go to Filter > Distort > Shear and apply the following settings:

2-shear

The image will now look like this:

2-effect2

Step 3

Still on “layer”, hit Ctrl + T and bring the free transform tool, right-click and choose “Warp”. Transform the image as shown below:

3-warp

This step requires a bit of practice and patience if you’re new to Photoshop. If you’re not successful for the first time, don’t give up :)

After warping the image, go to Filter > Liquidify and use a small brush to apply a few liquidify effect around the edge of the wing to make it more realistic:

3-liquidify

Step 4

Duplicate the “wing” layer once. On the duplicate layer, go to Filter > Distort > Ripple and apply the following settings:

4-ripple

Apply this filter a couple of times, then change the layer blending option to “Exclusion”. The effect so far will look like this:

4-effect1

Step 5

Create a new layer called “cloud” on top of all other layers. Go back to the original “wing” layer and load its selection by holding down your Ctrl key and left-click on the thumbnail of the text layer in the layer palette.

Expand the selection by 15px and set a 20px feather to it, your selection will now look like this:

5-select-2

Set the foreground colour to white and background colour to black, load the selection of the orginal “wing” layer, render some cloud inside it by going to Filter > Render > Cloud.

Then go to Filter > Render > Difference Cloud and render difference cloud. You image will look similar to this:

5-difference-cloud

Change the layer blending option of this layer to “Color Dodge” and you will have the following effect:

5-effect2

Step 6

To add a bit of motion into the image, we can duplicate the original wing layer once more and put the duplicated layer just above it, go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur and apply the following settings:

6-motion-blur

This is the effect after apply motion blur:

6-after-motion

Step 7

To add a bit colour and ligthing contrast to the image, we can again duplicate the original “wing” layer, and apply the following Black and White adjustments to the duplicated layer:

7-black-and-white

After apply the Black and White adjustments, hit Ctrl + J and duplicate this layer about 5 times (This will add more contrast to the image).

The effect will now look like this:

7-effect1

Step 8

Now we can simply group all previous layers together, duplicate the group and flip the duplicated group honrizontally.

The effect is shown as below: (I also adjusted the angle a bit)

8-effect1

Then I again duplicate the group layer twice more, resize them in the middle and this formed the below image of the fire bird:

firebird-final

Ok that’s it for this tutorial! I further adjusted a colour and curve of the image a bit and here is the final image: (click to enlarge)

An alternative version with shining effect:

Hope you enjoy this tutorial, drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out.

Cheers and have a nice day!

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31 Comments

RedPanda Says:
Great tutorial, however is it possible to have more details on how to get the shining effect?
admin Says:
hi redpanda, with the shining effect, all you have to do is adjust the curves setting in image adjustments :) probably do some hue adjustments as well.

With those shining dots, use a small brush with scattering dynamic to draw around the brid, duplicate this layer and gaussian blur it, change the blending opition to screen and you’re done!
Greenafik Says:
Yes is really cool bird ^^
PS-newbie Says:
Great tutorial indeed. However I managed only to make it look similar to this to step 7, from there, it just went fail. Might be lacking details, especially on the shining and color effects in the end. I got mine to look nothing like it. Great tut, poor result. :(
admin Says:
@psd-newbie, that’s great you can get up to step 7 :)
yeah step 8 can be a bit tricky to do … but if you could practice a bit of the free transform tool, and just rotate, resize, distort and see what effect that bring you.

I will add some more description to the shining part later in the day.
Henrique Mathias Says:
Really Amazing! I guess it can also be used to give fantastic effects in my drawnings! =D [I like to make my own wallpapers (;,,;)
psaddict Says:
Added to http://www.psaddict.com
Confused Says:
At step 5, how do you expand theselection?
Great tut btw!
sidik Says:
great tutorials, awsome bro, thanks for share
josh Says:
awsome tut. can you explain the selection part a little more i can get it selected and expanded but i am confused on the loading part because when i go to render the clouds and wat not it does not look anything like it is supposed to
Business Cards Says:
I like the one with the shining effect better, it looks like a phoenix. I can’t believe this can be achieved without any third party images as source photos! Great job! Thanks!
xea Says:
Thanks great tutorial ;)
Ps CS2 Says:
I was glad to see that there were no images required. However, you need to download a brush set, and that’s based on the same principal, because you use only on brush. I’d like to see some more tutorials from scratch on the net. (still a great tutorial.)
JWB Says:
I have photoshop cs4 extended crative suite I’m not new to this.I got to> left-click on the thumbnail of the text layer in the layer palette. Expand the selection by 15px and set a 20px feather to it, your selection will now look like this:
it didn’t have the line around it so clouds wheren’t in selection no line around as pictured. I don’t what went wrong
clouds filled the whole backgound and how do I get expand?
JWB Says:
I’m fairly new to this I meant to say and it’s creative not crative
admin Says:
@JWB: make sure you make the selection around the wing first BEFORE you render the cloud. So it will only render cloud within the selection.

Hope this helps :)
JWB Says:
Thanks for the suggeation but I can’t seem to find How to expand so that I can maybe click near design I tried 15 times and can’t get past control click thumbnail then what how and where is the way to EXPAND? Why is this page now black i can’t see what I’m typing/
paul Says:
Yep, stuck as well in the 5th part, could you explain what you mean with “expanding”, how you do it and with what tool?
Jeff Says:
Expanding selection: Go to “Select” menu, choose modify, then expand. I’m using CS3. Google is your friend =)
huwaw69 Says:
great effect, but the head of the bird in your image does not look like a bird, but great guide though, and thanks for sharing the brushes…
ryoung Says:
i love this tut. however when i apply the exclusion option at step 4 all it does is dim my image. what am i doing wrong?
Adam Says:
My clouds look nothing like in Step 5
Help?
Eugenio Says:
I also got stuck on Step 7. I duplicate the original “wings” layer and I go to Image>Adjustments>Black & White and set the parameters like you said, but I get nothing like what you have. And if I duplicate it 5 times, I’m left with something far nastier.

Am I missing something?

Thanks a lot for this, the effect is truly amazing and the simplicity of it makes it double amazing.
syukri_h Says:
great tutorials, awesome bro, thanks for share…love it !!
Ange Says:
I’ve been doing photoshop for a while now, and am quite ashamed to say that I get stuck on step four. I ripple it but when I get set it to exclusion it remains the same and then for the other steps, particularly the selection one and the black& white one I am totally confused, please help because I really think the tutorial is lovely~
Mauricio González Says:
whoa. amazing. Learned lots, tnxs man. Fire is always hard to accomplish, (at least for me) but it seems so easy using this. Will definetly try it out.
Rikardo Says:
I can’t make Step 5. pls help