Angel

Hi,

And xmas, how was it? Well, mine was great... and, maybe, by a touch of subjectivity precisely because of it I've chosen to teach you how to create an Angel today.

Actually I've choose do it another day, but couldn't ... the idea came to me in a morning: I was looking brushes on the Internet, to do a library, and was with the TV on, in SBT channel (SBT means Brazilian Television System, it's an open channel), only to don't stay alone... And this program, "Fantasia", was passing, with his 30 super sexy girls, in their bikinis, dancing and everything else ... But wasn't that, was the commercial break where "Victoria's Secret" fashion parade do his calling, and I love this parade, not only by these models using beautiful lingerie and jump high, more for that, but I also like to see the advertising and design they use. Noted in the wings, and I was wanting to make an angel: "Join the hungry with the desire to eat and 'voilà."

I found some interesting brushes of wings, and some very good image banks on the internet, and the best part: free. One of them, which did not expect, was the very Flickr, which I did not know very well, and I discovered that have search for individual images, without being per user.

Well, that's enough of my stories, the image that we gonna make is this

First Step

First of all you must pick up the brush of wings, image of a bird or some kind of footage of which can be removed the wings. I found some very good at Deviantart community, but if you do not find anything can search by Google you will find excellent references.

Secondly lack a photo in which to put the wings. What I found (above) is there by Flickr, in the "models" group, where, by sign, I found other very good photos.

When you got that, open the photo in Photoshop and make a selection around the body using the pen tool, by right-clicking and going on "create selection", duplicate the layer and delete the fund around. If where you would put the wings there is a hair that must be cut, would also be interesting to use the tool KnockOut 2, of Corel, by the way is excellent and very easy to use, but it is not the case today, then I will not go into details.

Second Step

Done this cut let's work. In this case we gonna use a brush, and by that we'll create a lot of layers which would work like fulfillment, removing the transparency, because, if you try to paint doing too much clicks with the brush, in white color, it may lose the details.

To do that load the wings brush that you want and paint doing two clicks without moving the mouse. It could be more or less, depends what brush you choose, but needs to be like this texture:

(Note at the semi transparency in the wing)

Doing this the details should stay and the wing doesn't looks unreal. This one is white, but you can do in black, or blue, depends of your fetish… oh please, don’t heard what I say.


Third Step

Stay looking not exactly what I usually call a wing, I didn’t saw many angel wings, but it doesn’t look to be some concrete wings, looks more like a superficial aura. Oh, create the two wings and past then in the place they should be behind the person layer, that was cut.

I’ve tried many ways to fill the area to make it look good, the best I found was this: with “Ctrl” key pressed do a click in the wings layer, don’t select it, just do a click. This creates a selection shape of the wings, and the best is, when you use the brush tool, in circular format, which have a little fade in the end, diameter of 300 pixels and the #8e8e8e color selected, you’ll see that the transparency stays with the selection, so do a click and paint all the select area, without doing more clicks, just like this:




Even this is not enough, so make 3 copies of this new layer, so you’ll have 4 gray layers, which hitting “Ctrl+E” you’ll join to create about solid thing:




Fourth Step

Now you can put your white layer above this, and will see that doesn’t have any transparency, and the details still a bit accented too. And talking about details let’s attempt our self for one in special: when someone takes a picture with this kind of light, strong, it reflects in some things, creating a specie of glow around the object, be it a t-shirt or, in this case, wings.

To do this duplicate the white wings layer, so go to “Filters> Blur> Gaussian Blur”. As I’m working with a big image (1280 x 800 pixels), I used like 26,5 pixels of radius.

This layer should be between the white and gray wings layers. Done this let the white one invisible, and so erase the center of this new layer, just like this:

To finish this step you should bring the opacity down to something like 48%.

Fifth Step

As we already take care of the brightness and the reflex of light in the wings, let’s take care about the shadows. The shadow must go in counterpoint about the light. You can use the brush tool with different sizes, fades and opacities to do a very good shadow:

This brings an interesting tridimensional aspect and enhance some feathers, what helps one more time in the composition. Now, to take a subtle touch of fanatic details you can add a little shadow at the left between the arm and the wing of this goddess. Like this:

Sixth Step

I do not know if I describe this as a step, but I thought that would be too long if continued to write without a new title, so I created this new step, which is only, and only to create a gradient the left side stop the right, and soft, to an emphasis on shadow and light point existing at the picture. Oh, also added a record in the lower left corner, which I forgot to erase while was creating the images of the tutorial.

That's all folks, I hope not take much to write again. See you.