Design Process
Took me a while but I’m now going to write the process on the evolution of the Aronil Phoenix Design. I was not very happy with my previous designs, cause it just didn’t represent me. The very first design I did.. i did in the wee morning hours atnd took me like 3 hours. So i’ll consider it a rushed job that was just to appease me for the time being. You are your worst client when it comes to trying to design something for yourself.
It also took me a while to figure out what kind of theme I wanted to go with. After much deciding, I felt that it would be best to go with an oriental feel. My original designs had me designing up something that was more sketchy. I was thinking of doing something that more sketchbook like but that just seemed boring and it didn’t feel like me. So why not do something while the craze of china is still going on. Besides it’s closer with my inherent appeal for japanese and chinese elements. Which you can clearly see on the header and the footer.
The phoenix design was the toughest part.
I had gone through a number of phoenix illustrations to get inspiration. One of them of course was the phoenix by Nick La. It helped a lot too that I found how to do glowing brush strokes and that became like the biggest kick off on the new design. Thats why there may be a bit of a psychedelic tone here and there.
I had first drawn out my phoenix like so.
Then i took a picture of it and started to follow it on illustrator and photoshop. A lot of going back and worth between the two programs here. Drawing the bird and the tailed off lines were with the pen tool. And using a very thin and solid brush stroke with intensity on. Getting the glowy and dusty effect had to do with a number of layer styles.
The wings were another headache by itself. I couldn’t draw the wings right and Fang gave me a great suggestion. She gave the actual wings of a crane. and from there it was quite easy to tweak to how i wanted my wings. Sure I later found out that I had vector ready wings that i could use, but it didn’t have the same feel. I didn’t want my phoenix too scary and not too tame at the same time. She had to have that sense of freedom yet elegance, one would image a firey phoenix to have.
And why a phoenix? If you read Silver Phoenix is my name.. you’ll understand why. 
it’s another personalisation thing.
After that is was all abotu searching for the right kind of elements to put in. I found a number of them on Istockphoto, shutterstock, scx and dreamstime. My favourite spots for free pictures or if i needed any inspiration.
The footer had me using layers styles to get that effect. I first got the hill silhouette by drawing it on illustrator and using the wrinkle tool and setting the wrinkle to not such a high intensity. Then i brought over to photoshop and used the gradient fills with different versions of blending modes. Adding the trees and the torii (which is a japanese gate that is usually seen in a number of animes), were from various sources. Same like the header.
And that finally thats how Aronil.com evolved.
See the process here.
The tutorials used are here.
1. Glowing tails,
3. Rainbow
