Latest Posts from PSD Vault
- February 8th, 2009
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:
Step 2
Still on “wing” layer, go to Filter > Distort > Twirl and apply the following settings:
Then go to Filter > Distort > Shear and apply the following settings:
The image will now look like this:
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:
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:
Step 4
Duplicate the “wing” layer once. On the duplicate layer, go to Filter > Distort > Ripple and apply the following settings:
Apply this filter a couple of times, then change the layer blending option to “Exclusion”. The effect so far will look like this:
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:
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:
Change the layer blending option of this layer to “Color Dodge” and you will have the following effect:
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:
This is the effect after apply motion blur:
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:
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:
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)
Then I again duplicate the group layer twice more, resize them in the middle and this formed the below image of the fire bird:
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!
User Comments:
Great tutorial, however is it possible to have more details on how to get the shining effect?
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!
Yes is really cool bird ^^
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. :(
@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.
Really Amazing! I guess it can also be used to give fantastic effects in my drawnings! =D [I like to make my own wallpapers (;,,;)
Added to http://www.psaddict.com
At step 5, how do you expand theselection?
Great tut btw!
great tutorials, awsome bro, thanks for share
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
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!
Thanks great tutorial ;)
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.)
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?
I’m fairly new to this I meant to say and it’s creative not crative
@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 :)
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/
Yep, stuck as well in the 5th part, could you explain what you mean with “expanding”, how you do it and with what tool?
Expanding selection: Go to “Select” menu, choose modify, then expand. I’m using CS3. Google is your friend =)
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…
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?
My clouds look nothing like in Step 5
Help?
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.
great tutorials, awesome bro, thanks for share…love it !!
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~
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.
I can’t make Step 5. pls help