Thunderbird
I think most people have heard the name thunderbird, but I dont think we really make the connection between the creature that inspired the car (or mail application) and an actual living bird that may still exist in our own back yard. Thunderbirds are common symbol in native american tradition and folklore, so you’d have to ask yourself was this thing a living creature or purely a product of their imagination? If they did in fact see a giant bird flying around, is it possible that some of them still exist today?
The finished thunderbird design.
Several versions of the thunderbird are competitng for acceptance, some of them describe the creature like a pterosaur and others desribe it like a large vulture. The image I”ve used is just more of a symbol of a large bird, I dont go into much more detail than that, such as providing scale or coloring or anything. The bird does have sort of a square wing, which I believe is similar to what vultures have, and if I had to pick sides as to which type of bird I would support in the running for official thunderbird, I would go with the vullture, just because I’ve heard more sightings describe a vulture type bird. Also one of the most popular accounts of a thunderbird in modern times was the “Lawndale Incident” which took place in Lawndale, Illinois in 1977 when a young boy was attacked and almost carried away by an enourmous bird resembling a vulture.
The method for creating the bird is pretty much the same as the bigfoot design. I started with a popular image of a thunderbird reconstruction in a museum, then sketched out the rough form. After the sketch was finished I scanned the image and cleaned it in Photoshop, then traced a vector version of the outline in Illustrator. After I had a vector outline of the bird, I brought that image back into Photoshop and filled it with a hand painted texture.
