Drawing the Twitter Bird
August 13th, 2009 by Leora
Twitter Bird Illustration 2009
Earlier this week I decided the little Subscribe icon (it’s the orange button with white curvy lines at the top left of the menu) needed some companionship. So instead of copying someone else’s version of the Twitter bird I drew my own. Here’s how I did it:
First, I drew a Twitter bird with a black pen, just the outline (see above). I then scanned this drawing into the computer. In Photoshop, I copied the layer and filled the layer (using the bucket tool) with one shade of blue. I selected one piece of the bird with the selection tool and deleted that shade of blue and filled it with other blue shade, so the bird has two shades of blue. When I used the bucket tool, it didn’t fill the entire area, which was OK, because I liked the white spots it left. I used the brush to emphasize the underside of the bird. I filled the eye with white paint using a large brush size.
To get it into the menu, I reduced the size of the bird to 15px high. That’s not very big at all! But I think you can still see the bird up there. I saved the bird as a .gif file, because if you use a .jpg it will show the white background on the menu (or some color, as opposed to transparent).
Anyway, if you want to follow me on Twitter, feel free to click on the Twitter birdie on the menu.
At last I have found the little blue bird at the top. Very cute. I’ll have to see what happens when I click there.
Cute – yeah, everything about Twitter is kind of cutesy but fun!
That looks very nice, Leora.
Thanks for visiting, James.
Very cute bird. I think I signed for tweeter but never used it. I figured out if somebody needs a tweet – they will stop by the blog – where my mood is “expressed” daily. Used to have Facebook – but deactivated it – it take lots of time. Your bird reminds me of a one that was an emblem for a kids festival called “Peace Flag” long time ago – I used to draw its blue bird of peace many times
For those of us that like expressing ourselves with visuals, blogging is more suitable than Twitter.
I find Twitter a great source of technical and design information and a good way to connect with other freelancers and small business people. But when I want to throw up a picture, blogging is the best!
This reminds me to open Tweet Deck.. I like you icon and all the pointers you’ve given me on Twitter…
I still haven’t seen any great advantage of twitter. How would I make a group like I’ve made in fb for Rosh Chodesh at Tel Shiloh?
http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
is the way to create a page on Facebook. Fill out all the information, then invite people to join the page.
I find Twitter great for meeting new people that share your interests. To find good people to follow, use hashtags in your tweets (such as #) and go to http://search.twitter.com/ and search for people who are tweeting topics that interest you.
This is cute!
Yeah, I keep getting “cute” for this! What I wanted to show is how you work large, even if you are trying to get something tiny. Not sure if that came across in the post.
Pingback: Tweeting Again | SysArcana