Its pretty easy to make good looking wings with the use of the Photoshop! This tutorial requires a little knowledge with using the Pen Tool in making irregular shapes. If you are not familiar with the use of the Pen Tool, I suggest look for other tutorials in the web for at least a basic overview on how it is used.
Lets start off with a new canvas with a black background, preferably a big canvas size so you can have a lot of space to work on. Colors should be reset to black and white.
Create a new layer. Then with the Pen Tool, make the shape of a wing. It may or may not be similar to the one shown on the left.
Once you have made the desired wing shape, fill it in with white. Simply "right click" your mouse and choose Fill Selection and press OK. Right click on the mouse again and choose Delete Path to take out the lines done with the Pen Tool.
Next, grab the Smudge Tool and choose a fairly medium brush and adjust the pressure of the smudge. I used a 10px sized brush with 70% pressure.
With that, smudge the edges of the wing being very careful to preserve its contours. It takes a while to perfect the strokes. Just keep on trying and eventually it will look fine.
When you are done with the smudge tool, choose Filter > Blur > Radial Blur. The amount of blur is set to 100 - Zoom - Good Quality. Its up to you to adjust the Center of the Blur. Then repeat the blur with an amount of 50 only.
Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur to smoothen out the grainy texture. Set the Blur to 1 pixel per inch.
Hold CTRL + click on the wing layer to select the image. Too add in the color, create a new layer and set the Blending Mode to Color . Then choose any 2 colors (if you will use the Color Gradient tool ) or single color you want and simply fill in the selection.
The final image should now look this way. Don't forget to put in the other wing. Feathers can also be made using these procedures.
