Inspired by a pigeon living outside my bedroom window I thought one sleepless night how great it would be to have an owl. In this tutorial I’ll walk you through taking a pencil sketch into Illustrator and creating vector artwork. Then we’ll bounce over to Photoshop and add some details and give it a washed look. There’s talk around the halls of the DiNG offices of a Graphic Design/Visual Artist Contest to design a DiNG with some pretty big prizes being mentioned **Cough, Cough. Enough talk, lets get to it!

Step 1
It’s easiest if you start with a simple sketch of your design. It isn’t worth it to get super detailed at this point, the sketch is mainly for reference. Next scan your sketch and place it in a new Illustrator file. Be sure to lock the image so it wont move around while you’re working with it. Select the sketch and go to Object > Lock > Selection

Step 2
Next you can begin to outline your sketch using the pen tool. (I outline using a .25 stroke in cyan)

Step 3
Once you have entire shapes outlined, open the pathfinder pallet Window > Pathfinder. You’ll want to select all the shapes that you want to merge together and then press the add to shape button then press expand. Continue this process through your whole sketch. You may want to use the direct select tool to adjust shapes more precisely.

Step 4
Now that you have all the shapes made you can begin to color your illustration. (I go to COLOURlovers to help find a great pallet to help with this step.)

Step 5
In this step you will be adding the outlines and strokes to the shapes to give them definition. Start by selecting a shape, then copy it, then paste it in place. This pastes the shape exactly on top of the previously copied shape. With the shape still selected send the shape behind by pressing command [. Next go to Object > Path > Offset Path. You can use the values shown but you may find that different settings work better for your illustration. After you have offset the path you can press the  add to shape button then expand like in Step 3.

Step 6
Now that you have your new shape all you need to do is adjust the color to add variation . Add strokes to some of the shapes that are more simplistic. Include things like the body, wings, and feet then copy them and use the pathfinder to make one large shape to add an outline around the entire object. You will need to use this technique to add outlines around entire objects. (Many times I’ll add multiple outlines to create a more dramatic effect.)

Step 7
For the details such as the ones on the owl’s wings, feet and eyes, you start by making two overlapping circles. Then use the pathfinder and press the Subtract from shape button then press Expand. This gives you a crescent shape. Then scale and position the shape appropriately and set the opacity (I used 40% opacity).

Step 8
This step shows the owl with all the details in place.

Step 9
It’s important at this point to start thinking about how your design will look on the different devices, e.g., phones, mp3 players, and game consoles. Since these devices are so different in shape it’s essential to “build in” room to adjust the layout for each device. In my design I gave myself plenty of room to adjust the top (clouds and moon) and the bottom (barn and hills) I tied it all together with a huge gradient background. This means that no matter what the device looks like I can scale all the elements to fit.

Step 10
Now place your other elements and adjust their scale and position.

 

 

Step 11
Now to add the shadows for the house and tree. Start with the pen tool and draw a rough outline of what the shadow should look like.

Step 12
Next, use the direct select tool to adjust the shape. Once you have the general shape of your shadow, use the add anchor point tool to add more precise shadows, like the shadows cast from the doors.  Pay attention to things like where your light source is in the illustration.

Step 13

Add any extra details or embellishments for final touches to your piece (I added some stylized swishes in the background. To create these I made one shape, duplicated it, and then varied the transparency).

 

Step 14
Now with the work done in Illustrator, it’s time to move over to Photoshop.

Step 15
Create a new Photoshop document with these specs. Since the elements created in Illustrator are vector, you’ll need to work with them rasterized in Photoshop. Starting big is always best when you’re making DiNGS.

Step 16
Begin copying and pasting the elements from Illustrator to your new Photoshop document. When you paste be sure to select pixels (Some may argue to keep these smart objects but hold your horses, you’ll see). Continue this process for all the elements of the illustration.

Step 17
Next add drop shadows on the owl, moon, and clouds with a layer style.

Step 18
For the hills use an outer glow with these settings.

Step 19
To add a little depth to the illustration, use the Burn tool with a 300 pixel brush with the exposure set to 20.

Step 20
To add the light spilling from the barn’s door created a new layer and with a small brush paint in the yellow at 20% opacity. Then clean up the area around the door with the eraser tool with the hardness set to 100%

Step 21
Next it’s on to the rising sun behind the hills. Create a new layer behind the hills and use a 1700 pixel soft brush with a darker yellow hue and click once to get the sun. Next use the move tool to position the sun behind the hills.

Step 22
Use the custom shape tool to make rays emitting from the sun. Make the shape super big (I made mine twice the size of the document) then center the burst around the sun.

Step 23
Next, rasterize the shape layer and use a large soft eraser to blend the ends of the rays into the background.

Step 24
To blend the rays even more into the illustration, set the blend mode screen and uncheck the black blend box.

Step 25
To make the sky have some harsh contrast, create a new layer and add a black to transparent gradient. Don’t gradient the entire document instead only drag the tool down about 1/3 of the entire document.

Step 26
To create the stars, I’ll share a technique I learned years ago (If I knew who to credit I would). Start by creating a new layer and filling it with black. Next go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise..