I knew I wanted some big creature bending itself around my text – and I picked out a peacock quite early. I’ve wanted to do something peacock related ever since running around a big old house chasing one with Roz ( here ), and seeing the excellent Meg Hunt’s pretty peacock lady reminded me of that fact.

Once I got something I thought I could work with, I should have scanned it. But I’m pretty lazy, so instead of getting up and finding my scanner amongst the mess… I use my webcam. Guilty secret is out.

that’s one of the great things about illustrator though – it doesn’t matter how lazy my linework is – so long as the shapes are good, I can work with it. And that’s what I did next. I pentooled up the image to look just like it does in the sketch, and started adding my colours.

And decided this was too simplistic . Some of my other thumbnails had involved more detail to the feathers, so I knocked up a pattern and cut up the large pieces of colour with it, to make a more detailed bird, and then spent forever and ever trying to work out how I wanted the colours to be. I still really like the more bluey-purple ones, but I thought all out colour would be more fun, so I stuck with that one in the end.

From there it was just a case of taking the image into photoshop and adding a couple of subtle textures to knock back the glare and add a little interest and detail. Which lead to the final image which you can see below! Or see it in action too.

Oh yeah, and it was all done for my newsletter, to which you can sign up here.