Dragonfly Wings
Written July 2010
As is the case for most of my tutorials, this one is graphics intense!
If you are on a slow connection or running a slower computer you may want to give it a bit to load.
This tutorial demonstrates only one of many ways to create dragonfly like wings for your faeries.
It is designed in Photoshop CS 4 and to my knowledge it works this way in versions 7 through CS 3 of Photoshop. People with knowledge of their own graphics program including Paint Shop Pro should be able to easily translate this for that program.
This is my workspace. I keep a new window open to see what Im working on at normal size at all times. I use the pencil tool for pixeling, the paintbrush tool for colors and shading. Aside from those two tools I use the layers palette and that's all. For this tutorial I used only the pencil tool.
Pull a medium value, low saturation color from the ones you've used on your faery already. Here I've chosen a teal color from her dress. Draw two horizontal tear drops stretched out just a bit like below with your pencil tool:
Clean up all those jagged edges. Yes this is tedious and boring but it's worth it to get clean transparency plus once you get used to doing it it goes by pretty fast.
Still using your pencil tool, add "veins" to your wings". Clean up any jagged pixels!
Choose a lighter version of the outline color you've been using and add a line of shadow along the bottoms of the wings like below:
Pull another color out of the faery's attire that is close to the color you were using on the color wheel. So if you used green for your wing outline you could choose a blue-green, blue, yellow or yellow-green here. I am going with blue since the yellow colors would be too bright for shadows ;)
Now use that brighter color, or a much lighter version of your first shadow color to add highlights along the top edges of your wings like below:
Merge your wing layers (I hope youve been using layers!) Duplicate that layer, mirror it and align the new layer to match your first wing. Now you have dragonfly wings for your faery =)
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