32 AIRBRUSH STEP BY STEP 03/19 E
STEP BY STEP | Alouette
04
The eagle’s head
Since I’m a pretty impatient
person, I decided to begin with the
eagle’s head, because I wanted to kick
things off with an optical achievement,
so to speak. I set things up with white
so as to lighten some areas up and
make some important points recog-
nizable moving forward. Especially in
the eye and beak sections, you always
have some room to play around a bit.
For these areas, I already made use of
texture stencils, which I personally love
to make use of in order to blow some
life into the motif. At this juncture, the
beak should already be given its yellow
color.05
The beak
For the beak, I work from light to dark, from white
to gray, and then further right into black so as to slowly
create shadow effects. While working, I don’t proceed in
a structured manner or according to a “school book“, but
rather according to my gut feeling and what happens in the
course of the work. After all, it’s the result that’s the most
important thing here.06
Eye and textures
From layer to layer, I’ll automatically get darker and
work some yellow to brown hues into the eye and beak are-
as. While doing this, I keep using the texture stencil every
now and again. The plumage behind the beak needs to be
brought out a bit here too.07
Fine plumage
After the shadow and light effects, and after the
reflection in the eye has been made, I spend some time with
the fine plumage. There were generally a lot of details ad-
ded to the head. Will they be seen when the helicopter is
in the air? No way...! But it’s fun and after all, you want to
deliver a wonderful product!