True Stories: Secrets from Chef

Drawing an icon: Creating and destroying the Earth

Last time we finished off with sending sketches to the Invaders corrected and refined according to their comments. The invaders had a lot of discussions and tentacle waving. While they were killing the time all of their Gigantic Assault Squids contracted the Space Pox and died. Oops! There goes the bio-weaponry. The good old methods proved to be more reliable. So the decision was made to invade planets using flying saucers with powerful blasters like in good old times.

While the invaders still have their saucers up and flying, we decided to draw the Earth invasion icon first.

So, let’s start off with drawing the Earth and UFOs hanging above it. This drawing is schematic so that we can decide on the composition.

We start with detailing detailing from the Earth, the cradle of our civilization. The best way to draw the terrestrial parts is to download a vector file with outlines of continents and wrap it around a sphere using MapArt effect of 3D Revolve.

Here is what we got:

Once the continents are wrapped around the globe with Eurasia facing us and America hidden in the back, we can continue with drawing the relief of the surface (to make sure the Earth does not appear as a plain green continent). We don’t need high detailing here, since the icon is small and is far from being photorealistic.
We add some volume to the planet and apply the same but black-and-white gradient over the Earth in Multiply mode:

Now it is time for the UFOs. We replicate the ellipses, reduce and and replicate them again to get conning towers. Now we need to apply gradients so our UFOs will be ready to take off.

Now it is time for the lasers. Unfortunately there is no recipe for drawing laser beams (so we set transparency to 30%, choose the Screen blending mode, replicate the layer for 11 times and voila!). We did our best. We had to trust our hunch on the way. The same can be said about the flames and other elements showing that our Mother Earth is having hard time.

Done! Next time we will draw the two remaining icons and let you know about how to reduce them properly.

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