Mystic Flaming feather by Katherine Lightwood

Mystic Flaming feather 

By Katherine Lightwood

A famous astrophysicist Carl Sagan once said,

“Our universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us then it seems like an awful waste of space.”

This is a human tendency that we focus on ourselves so much, most of the time we tend to forget that there are other things which exist apart from us. It is quite a shame if we compare ourselves with this massive universe. The universe that we see is estimated to be 93 billion light-years across in diameter. Consisting of millions and millions of stars, planets, galaxies and other celestial entities we might never know about. Since the beginning of human civilization, we’ve seen how greed and condescending attitude of mankind has led to the demolition of so many empires through the course of history.

We are given this life to be purposeful, not to dwell with each other over those silliest things. We should be responsible for our own actions that are leading to such huge destruction of natural resources. It is not fair to ravage this planet which we call home because of our own selfish ego.

A couple of months ago a competition was held between centers of Arena Animations all over India called “Creative Minds”. Like every year, our institute also took part in it.  It was the last day of submission of all the artworks that students had made. For that, I had already designed a poster and gave it for further submission. So, I had nothing to do that day.

All my fellow classmates were busy in fixing their last-minute corrections. I was sitting on a chair at the farthest corner of the room, staying away from all the hustle without bothering anyone. Staring at the floor, I was completely lost in some thoughts that were distressing me at that time.

Suddenly a voice calling my name jolted me from my trail of thoughts. To my surprise, I found out it was my teacher. I got quite anxious, I wondered if I have done any mistake or if something is horribly wrong with the poster that I have submitted. Clumsily I walked up to him. His face was quite relaxed, couldn’t see any traces of annoyance. So I thought it might be some other reason which was not related to poster making or any mistakes I have made.

Then he pointed at the laptop that was lying on the table, there was a picture printed at its front.

“Hey, look at this picture, how about trying something like this, see how beautiful it looks? Pay attention to the colors, the painter has used. Isn’t it so serene? He said.

I nodded to show my accordance. I got lost for a moment on that wallpaper. It was indeed quite surreal.

The picture was describing a grayish wolf that was standing on a planet that looked like earth. Beyond that, there was a vast black space with shining nebulas and stars. There was also some space mist hovering all over the space. There was also a blue planet at a distance on the left side of the image. The wolf also had some incandescent bluish glow at the torso and forehead. And that was the whole image.

Excuse me for being a bit metaphorical, but that’s how I can explain. The wallpaper was matching with the color of that day. Even though the day was quite hot, but it was calm and so was that wallpaper.

I stared at the picture for a bit and focused on the main landmarks that I should remember.

“Sir, I’ll definitely try to recreate that”.

And that’s all I said. I couldn’t say much as I didn’t want his hopes to get high. I was not sure if I could recreate such a piece.

On my way home I couldn’t stop thinking about that enigmatic painting. What could be its name if I become successful to make it! At that time my entire mind could think was flaming feather because of its feathers that were glowing with that electric blue hue. And that, my friends, is the perk of being an obsessive fantasy nerd.

I reached my home grabbed my sketch file and started drawing a rough outline of the fading memories that I’ve left of that painting.

I finished my rough sketch and proceeded to the next step of my project. I decided that it has to be a digital painting. As I am not using any stock pictures or doing any photo manipulation to make this artwork possible.

I wanted to pay all my regards to that unknown artist who made this beautiful piece.

So, I turned on my computer and opened a document of 1728 pixels by 1080 pixels in Adobe Photoshop. To get into the mood I searched some ambient space music from my playlist and hit play. And as the deep hum of cello strung into my ears, I quickly got into work. I know it sounds a bit cliched but that’s how I set my mood.

Music helps me a lot with my procrastination problems and anxiety as if it syncs with the rhythm of that painting. As I got started, I roughly drew a sketch of my wolf. I keep on adding layers of details over the sketch until I was satisfied.

My sketch turned out well. Then I moved on to adding the main colored detail. I started adding furs to my wolf. At first, I started with the lighter Gray, and then gradually moved on to the darker shades of Gray.

After I was done covering my wolf with furs, now it was the time to add strong highlights and shadows. I used pure black for darkest shadows and pure white for highlights.

Then I remembered I have to add another shade of highlights at its torso, neck, ears, and nose. And after a bit of adjustment, I was finished with my wolf.

After my wolf was done, the first thing I did have I turned the background black. It would be much easier to work on a black base for space painting. Now it’s time to draw the planets.

For drawing planets at first I made three circles, on those three different layers but of the same size and filled it with a dark blue color. But on the shadow layer, I filled the circle with black.

I blurred the shadow layer and shifted it downward to create a core shadow of the planet.

At the atmosphere layer, I turned down the fill up to zero percent and with layer style option, gave it a whitish blue outer glow and a dark blue inner glow, and my planet was done.

I repeated the same process for the planet beneath the wolf. But the only difference was in the place of the circle, I made a semi-circle and the process was quite the same.

I also created some casting shadows of the wolf to make it look a bit realistic as if the wolf is actually standing on the planet.

Now only a few things were left, and that was drawing stars, nebulae, and the mist. Therefore, I made a few white and bluish dots and gave it a white outer glow. For nebula, I made some abstract shapes and finished it with some erasing and smudging until I was satisfied. Nebula and mist turned out well.

And there you go ladies and gentlemen, that’s how I finished my Mystic Flaming feather digital painting.

 Every credit of that digital art goes to that anonymous artist who made this original artwork and my teacher who considered me to recreate such an enchanting piece.

Till then thank you for reading my blog and have a nice day ahead.

Katherine Lightwood