Drawing a realistic aircraft propeller blade

Question

Find myself a bit stumped on this one. I'm working on a logo that needs to have what appears to be wooden propeller blades (4) projecting from a center hub. I've looked everywhere trying to find some examples on how to draw realistic blades, i.e. proper curves and shading to show pitch etc. not just flower petals, but only come up with sites that have working drawing for manufacturing them. Looked over previous comments from 06/07 but Teri's suggestions only appear to show how to do a polar rotation. Any ideas or sites to search is greatly appreciated.
BTW, using CS3, WIN XP Pro
Thx in advance.

Answer 1

> I did several samplings with LiveTrace to see what the linework might entail.
If I'm reading this comment correctly, you may have a gross misunderstainding of what auto-tracing (LiveTrace) is all about.
In almost all cases, running an auto trace on a raster image would in no way yield results that one would use as an "instructional guide" for the proper way to draw something deliberately from scratch. An auto trace program simply tries to scribe a path around a group of contiguous same-colored pixels. Even doing that, its result is seldom indicative of the *optimum* path that could be drawn to describe the intended shape. Most autotrace programs have no "intelligence" to discern what the shape *is supposed to be.*
The following is not meant to beat up on you, so don't take offense. This is one of those kinds of topics which recur here often, so the rest of this is not directed specifically at you, but is offered to all those who have posted (or will) similar questions.
"How do I draw a...." questions like this appear all the time. Such questions are very difficult to answer without alot of guesswork, when the questioner fails to provide any indication of the desired *stylistic* results.
You do not say what part of the illustration you are having trouble with. I assume it is not the sillouette or profile of the whole blade itself, but a treatment of the shading that would be necessary to suggest the twist of the blade.
Shading can be suggested in many different ways, and the problem of shading the surface of a propeller blade is no different from that of any other subject. The method chosen depends upon the desired style, and the practical/ limitations of the intended use.
You only say you are creating a "logo" (a grossly overused term these days), that it needs to specifically be a "wooden" blade, and that you want it to appear "realistic." Those may very well be contradictory requirements.
WhenEVER you use "how do I draw..." and "logo" in the same breath, you really should include some parameters:
- Continuous-tone or Line-art?
- Number of colors?
- Spot color or process color?
- Intended usage? (Print, web, signage, video? All of those? Some of those? Only one of those?)
- Scaling reqirements? (Billboards? Pencil imprints?)
Most actual identity marks ("logos") have to be very versatile in terms of reproduction--everything from full-color print brochures and placement ads to signage to embroidered golf shirts to tiny imprints on ballpoint pens. That usually means that the base logo must be tastefully designed to the lowest common denominator of one or two color line art--which by definition is very stylized and not what one would usually call "realistic." It also may preclude the kind of detail necessary to suggest a specific texture or material (in this case, wood).
You can create "realistic" shading in programs like Illustrator in several ways: Blends, Gradient Fills, or Mesh Gradients. And you can even make them resemble woodgrain. But those techniques imply (at least) continuous-tone artwork, which rules out many common uses of proper identity marks.
You can create highly-stylized, "shading" by employing a number of line art techniques: hatching, parallel lines, dot screens, posterization. But those techniques are not what one would call "realistic."
If you need the design to be robust enough to withstand extreme reduction, then you may have to sacrifice the woodgrain requirement. If the woodgrain requirement is critial or central to the mesage, then you probably will have to come up with a way to depict it and sacrifice something else; for example design the mark as a zoomed-in detail of the propeller, that symbolically suggests a twist, rather than trying to depict an entire propeller.
"How to draw a...." questions, whether from vector newcomers or longtime users, are most of the fun in this forum. But I (and others here) could draw "propellers" all day long and still not hit upon what you need or have in mind. So when the question is vague, or ambiguous, we often just pass. That's why a stylistic example and/or some definitive parameters are needed.
JET