The Pink Flamingo Illustration is the tenth in an ongoing series of Zoo Portraits, a personal project created to explore the Adobe CC mobile workflow. The illustration was drawn with Adobe Draw on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. 

I started by placing a photo that I took at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. The photo was synced from my desktop to my iPad using Lightroom Mobile. I traced the photo with a black marker pen on a draw layer above the image layer.

I challenged myself to keep this drawing clean and simple like the previously completed Merkat.

The background pattern was created with Adobe Capture by photographing a palm leaf photo. I used my iPhone to capture the shape directly from my large screen monitor.

The palm leaf shape was saved to a CC Library. I placed the shape on a new layer in Draw and filled it with the olive green color. All of the holes created by the palm leaf shape were randomly filled with green and blue colors.

I have challenged myself to try something new with each illustration in this zoo portrait series. For the Flamingo I intentionally kept the color palette very simple. I mostly used the RGB color sliders to mix warm tones for the flamingo, and cool green tones for the background.

After filling all background shapes with colors, I added a solid block of green under everything just incase I missed a few spots.

I finished off the drawing by adding a little shading and light to the eye and beak. The shading is shown below in the top most layer.

– DETAILS –

The completed drawing was sent to Illustrator on my desktop where I added a soft drop shadow. Shadows are not included with the current set of Draw tools.