Mystic Flaming Feather - By The Silent Artist (Katherine Lightwood)

Mystic Flaming Feather

By Katherine Lightwood

We might consider ourselves to be the most superior species in hierarchy or declare ourselves to be the ruler of this planet but have you ever wondered how insignificant we are if we compare us with this massive universe! Our observable universe is estimated to be about 93 billion light years in diameter approximately. And in this huge space, among these millions of galaxies and clusters of stars, here, we are revolving around a medium sized star, bragging about our ‘significance’.

Since the dawn of humanity, we have seen the decadence of many civilisations mostly because of overly selfish and condescending attitude. We are here for a short stay, we shouldn't prioritise ourselves that much. Rather, we should admire our planet, be responsible for our actions and take care of this beautiful paradise that we call home.

Few months ago when we were competing against other centres of Arena Animation, I was sitting with some of my fellow classmates in our graphic lab. It was a hot summer evening, sitting idly I was thinking about something completely unrelated to that situation. As I had completed designing my poster for my competition, I practically had nothing to do apart from staring at the floor and amusing myself with my fancy thoughts.

And all of a sudden my teacher called my name. I was jolted from my trail of thoughts. Startled by his voice, I got up from my chair and went up to him. Then he pointed at a picture printed at the back of a laptop lying on the table.

"Why don't you try something like this? See how serene it looks! Focus on the colours artist has used, everything is so balanced", he said.

For a moment, I got lost on that wallpaper. It was really breathtaking. The picture describes a beautiful grey wolf standing on a planet seems like earth. Beyond that, there were blue nebulae and stars brightly shining on the vast black space.

At a distance there was also a blue planet shining dimly at the left side of that wallpaper. The wolf had some aquamarine glow running through its torso and forehead. And that was the picture. It may sound a bit unusual, but let me put it in my own words, that wallpaper was matching with the color of that day.

I stared it for a few moments and tried to remember the main landmarks of that wallpaper.

"Sir, I’ll definitely try to recreate that". 

And somehow that's all I could manage to say to my teacher. After a while we all went home. On my way, all I could think about was that enigmatic wallpaper. I even named the wolf, and that would definitely be “Flaming Feather” because of its glowing furs so the name was quite obvious. And that my friends, is perk of being a fantasy freak.

I got home, freshened up and grabbed my drawing book and started drawing a rough sketch of the memories I've left of that wallpaper. After I was satisfied with my doodling, I prepared myself to proceed for the next step of my artwork. I decided that it will be a proper digital painting. I will not use any stock images for manipulation or editing to make this artwork possible.

I must honour the skill of that anonymous artist who made that original piece.

So I switched on my computer and opened Adobe Photoshop. I created a document of 1728 pixels by 1080 pixels. To set my mood to make that mystical painting, I turned on some epic space music. And as the deep cord of cello strung in my ears, I got into my work. I know it may sound very cheesy and weird, but that's how I set my mood. Music helps me a lot with my procrastination problem as if it syncs with the rhythm of the painting.

As I started with my project, I opened a new layer and roughly sketched the wolf with fading brush by setting it's opacity to 100% and flow to 35%. After getting a satisfied with shape of my wolf, I moved on to another layer and put a few extra details over it, like lightly drawing the shape of furs and nails of the wolf. After repeating the process for many times, I sketched the final outline.

I was quite happy with my wolf sketch. Then I moved on to the next layer of Photoshop. All the layers that were used to draw the wolf sketch were grouped together. But I didn't merge those layers; I kept it as it is, if it might be needed for further editing.

I got a background layer below the sketch group and turned the whole layer into solid black with paint bucket tool, as the space has to be black. It’s easy to work on a space painting with a black base.

After the background and sketch was done, I got another layer at the top of all and started adding furs to my wolf, beginning with light grey strokes at different directions, then moving on to darker grays. I continued adding furs with same motions by keeping my hand relaxed as possible. After I finished covering my wolf, I started adding highlights and shadows. I added highlights with pure white and darkest shadows with black.

Now my wolf started looking a bit realistic. I remembered the wolf had aquamarine furs too, so I added a few strokes of light fluorescent blue at its torso and forehead. And that's how I was done with my wolf.

Now it was the time to draw those two planets. I grouped the other layers, named it properly and put it those aside for my further convenience. I got three separate layers and named them as shadow, atmosphere and base respectively.

At the base layer, I started drawing a circle with elliptical marquee tool and filled it with dark blue color. I copied the same circle into other two layers. But at the shadow layer, I made it black and blurred it up to 100%, I used Gaussian blur to make that happen. I shifted the layer towards the bottom so that the core shadow would look realistic.

Moving on to the atmosphere layer, I lowered the fill percentage up to 0 % and opened the layer style option. I gave the layer an electric blue outer glow and light bluish inner glow. I adjusted the spread and opacity of glow as I wanted. And here we go, the planet was done.

I repeated the same process with the planet beneath the wolf. But as the planet was partially visible I only drew a semicircle at the place of the full circle. And the process was pretty much the same. I also made some core shadow of the wolf to give it a more realistic effect.

Now, the only thing left was the stars and nebulae. For the nebulae I used the same fading brush and lightly scribbled some cloud shapes. (For further information the brush I am using is available in default presets of Adobe Photoshop).

I used the same dark blue colour that I've used for the planet base. After a few adjustments and erasing I finished drawing my nebula. And for the stars, I randomly put some white and blue dots and gave it a bluish outer glow.

And there you go my friends; my space wolf digital painting is finished.

After that I thought a bit more about the painting's name because flaming feather was sounding a bit vague, I named it as Mystic Flaming feather. As the concept was very mystical to me, so I thought to add mystic to its name.

At that point I had devoted complete three days on that project. It was four in the morning; I saved my Photoshop file, rendered the jpeg image and transferred it to my phone. I could hardly sleep that day. I was little happy, after a long time I felt that I had done something productive. Later that day I showed my painting to my teacher and he was quite satisfied with the result. He suggested a few corrections which I forgot to fix as usual.

And ladies and gentlemen, that's how I completed my Mystic Flaming feather digital painting. All the credit goes to that anonymous painter who created the original artwork and my teacher who suggested me to recreate such a wonderful piece.

Thank you everyone for reading my blog and please excuse my mistakes as I am only a beginner.

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Katherine Lightwood