Thanks Sean for hooking me up with this one.  I see this bird over my house almost daily. The author got this paint perfect, and the sound of this beast is spot on.


Background image is Dayton, Ohio from Google Earth.

hey  i have a question for you, what do you use to cut out the heli from the original screen shot? and how to you cut out the rotor blades with out have parts of the original screenie in it??

Thanks guys.

lunitic_8 wrote on Mar 28^th, 2009 at 1:12pm:



I use the eraser tool. I get my background selected and then find a screenshot where the lighting is pretty close,next I crop as tight as I need the screenshot to be and then copy and paste it as a new layer.Next I set my eraser to 100% opacity and a rather large size and get rid of most of what I'm not going to use from the screenshot trying to get as tight as possible around the plane. Then I set my eraser to about a 15-20% opacity and lightly work my way around the plane adjusting size to fit into nooks and crannies.

For the rotor there are a few ways, some are easier than others and some have better results than others.  I erased the prop off of this one down to the center hub, and then painted 4 thick black lines, then used radial & Gaussian blur give it that spin look, then I created an ellipse as a new layer above that filled it with dark gray paint and set the visibility on it to around 10%. and then took the eraser brush and feathered the edges of the disc.

The other way to do it is to take a shot of the prop/rotor while it's not spinning. Then erase everything around the prop & skew the proportions to make it fit and then do the blur.

I've done both, and it's pretty much just moment dependent for me on which method I use.

BigTruck wrote on Mar 29^th, 2009 at 12:41am: