Creating Your Own Phoenix Bird!

A phoenix bird drawing will test your ability to see and paint light on an object. In essence, you are using a dark background and learning to create phoenix drawings with negative space!

While it may seem like a daunting task, there are ways to make learning how to draw a phoenix easier with your digital art tools. For the most part, we will go over this awesome topic with what tools you need and how to change it to get the desired effects.

The phoenix bird is a mythical beast that represents reincarnation. After it burns itself out, it will rise from an egg created from the ashes to repeat the cycle of life.

How you want to interpret this idea is up to you. As an artist, the most dramatic effect is when the phoenix has just been born.

Follow along as we draw this amazing creature!

1. Gesture drawing and form

As you have probably guessed, the best way to make a phoenix bird drawing is to start with a bird’s body. You can create your own bird or reference one from real life.

A common bird to reference is the male peacock as there are a lot exaggerated feathers you can use for the tail. It’s up to you.

Anyway, start with a simple gesture sketch on a new layer. Think about how you want the bird to look like and what type of action or pose you want the animal to be in.

From there, decide on how you want the flame behave. For my example, it is just a simple sketch of where I want the flames to be placed.

I have also exaggerated the tail a bit as I want the flames to connect to it. Use your own imagination and see what you come up with!

2. Separating and smudging

At this stage, after you finished your quick gesture sketch, is to think about how you want to separate all your layers.

For my drawing, I have set it to three layers: the bird, the other wing, and the flames.

You may require more if you are just starting out. This is to gain confidence by allowing you to correct mistakes easier since the layers are not dependent on one another.

With your smudge brush, set it to 100% pressure and violently smudge in the details of the wings and the overall form.

Switch to a less pressure to smudge out the wings even further to create a blurred effect. You may need to use the brush tool to paint additional details that your smudge brush has gone over.

After this, fill in any ‘holes’ in your bird as you do not want parts of the background showing through the main body of your phoenix bird drawing.

To do this, create another layer underneath, paint it white, and merge it with the bird layer.

For the flames, you can start creating flames simply by smudging it in a circular pattern. At the same time, angle the flames up to create a rising effect.

3. Reversing your tones

At this point, we will be concentrating on bringing out the fire in your phoenix bird drawing even further. In order to do that, we need to reverse the composition a bit.

While your background was white, fill it in with a dark background. This should let you look at where you can start painting light.

For your bird, highlight the edges to separate it from the background. As for the flames, you have a few choices you can do here.

First, you can continue painting in a middle tone that is lighter than the background.

However, if you notice that the color of your flame layer is dark, you can simply inverse the layer to flip it to a lighter value automatically.

After that, duplicate your flame layer to create multiple versions of the layer that you can manipulate. Start smudging in these extra layers and remerge them if necessary.

You want a flame layer at the back and at the front to show that the phoenix is engulfed as much as possible.

In addition, you may want to alter the transparency of the layers a bit to show the phoenix bird drawing underneath.

4. Final touches

Here is where you really get to emphasize the flames in your phoenix bird drawing with different types of flames. You want to focus on getting the texture just right for this.

While you can continue to smudge existing layers in a circular method, there are additional techniques you should try.

First, you can start with a smaller brush and use the splatter function. Aim the brush to create waves of where the fire will burst from. Then, smudge these around to create sparks or pieces of lava.

Next, switch to a smaller brush and begin dashing in bits of light to create smaller sparks of amber.

You can do this all on a separate layer or an existing one depending on how confident you are.

Finally, when you have all the fire bits done, work on the bird and how the fire will light up the body to show a reflection the heat source below it.

At the end, you may need to increase the contrast on your painting just to emphasize the flames a bit more.

You can do this with creating an adjustment layer and changing the contrast on that.

If your program does not have adjustment layers, then simply create a layer, paint it with more light and shadows, and then change the layer blending to overlay or soft light.

There are also contrasting options as well that you can do on individual layers or on the picture as a whole. You got options so play around with it!

I hope you enjoy this guide to creating your own phoenix bird drawing digitally and the benefits of learning to paint light. I look forward to what you can come up with in the gallery section!

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