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Description
I have been working on this off and on for over a year now. I call it my glorified scrapbook experiment. I gave up on it several times. I initially started by creating a gradient mesh of the flower but it looked too photographic for my tastes. I ended up creating vector images from several different photos and composed them into one scene.

The flower and hummingbird were taken from a scanned photo from Birds and Blooms magazine (Aug 2003 credit Anthony Mercieca). I edited/cropped/trimmed the images in Photoshop to make them easier to live trace. For the hummingbird I cut him up into four separate pieces (front and back wings, body and tail). I did that so I could apply separate shadows to the hummingbird body. I didn’t like the original cactus the flower was attached to so I found a different public domain picture of a similar cactus. I then used some custom Live Trace settings on each piece and then converted them to a live paint object so I could adjust colors. The green chives were hand drawn and the pink flowers were 3 different flower symbols I created (copied and scaled as needed).

I found a photo of a window in a set of game level textures I've used for my game levels from BerneyBoy ([link] ). I also used a modified image (vectorized) from that texture pack to create the background. With simple blurs of vector paths I added inner shadows to the window to give it more depth. The planter box was another photo I found in a magazine and scanned.

Several masks were used on the cactus, hummingbird and chives to confine shadows to objects and not the background. That was a major pain but worth the work. Background shadows were done manually with simple blurs.

I wanted to create a painterly look using Illustrator. There are still some things I think I could do better in Photoshop but my goal was to do the majority of this in Illustrator. One major drawback of converting complex objects to Live Paint objects is the huge amount of memory it uses. This drawing crashed many times causing me to pull most of my gray hairs out.

Description
I have been working on this off and on for over a year now. I call it my glorified scrapbook experiment. I gave up on it several times. I initially started by creating a gradient mesh of the flower but it looked too photographic for my tastes. I ended up creating vector images from several different photos and composed them into one scene.

The flower and hummingbird were taken from a scanned photo from Birds and Blooms magazine (Aug 2003 credit Anthony Mercieca). I edited/cropped/trimmed the images in Photoshop to make them easier to live trace. For the hummingbird I cut him up into four separate pieces (front and back wings, body and tail). I did that so I could apply separate shadows to the hummingbird body. I didn’t like the original cactus the flower was attached to so I found a different public domain picture of a similar cactus. I then used some custom Live Trace settings on each piece and then converted them to a live paint object so I could adjust colors. The green chives were hand drawn and the pink flowers were 3 different flower symbols I created (copied and scaled as needed).

I found a photo of a window in a set of game level textures I've used for my game levels from BerneyBoy ([link] ). I also used a modified image (vectorized) from that texture pack to create the background. With simple blurs of vector paths I added inner shadows to the window to give it more depth. The planter box was another photo I found in a magazine and scanned.

Several masks were used on the cactus, hummingbird and chives to confine shadows to objects and not the background. That was a major pain but worth the work. Background shadows were done manually with simple blurs.

I wanted to create a painterly look using Illustrator. There are still some things I think I could do better in Photoshop but my goal was to do the majority of this in Illustrator. One major drawback of converting complex objects to Live Paint objects is the huge amount of memory it uses. This drawing crashed many times causing me to pull most of my gray hairs out.