Psalm 18—Artwork

Learn more about Christ in the Psalms weekly artwork and see previous pieces here.

Myra Ferguson

About the Artist • About the Piece

Myra Ferguson is a digital media educator, author, and freelance designer/developer. She teaches at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

After writing How to Cheat in Adobe Animate CC, Myra authored video courses, wrote Linkedln Skill Assessments and the Adobe Certified Instructor Exam for Design and Layout, and worked with the Adobe Learn team to improve content discoverability. Myra also creates video tutorials and writes articles for CreativePro to help Adobe users learn a variety of Creative Cloud applications.

Psalm 18:10b-18:11 describes God responding to David’s distress call as “he came swiftly on the wings of the wind. He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him, thick clouds dark with water.” The preceding verses paint a picture of God’s wrath towards David’s enemies, so I envisioned angry skies and wondered how a wing might be a part of that.

I started with an Adobe Stock image that showed a fierce storm forming over water. The shape of the shelf cloud resembled a wing, so looked for another stock image with a bird that had a similar wing shape.

I found an image of a golden eagle. Using an image of a wing from a golden eagle seemed appropriate, as it’s one of the largest birds of prey in North America. Birds of prey generally symbolize power and precision and are often associated with the idea of being a divine messenger.

I combined the two images in Photoshop, rotating the wing to match the orientation of the cloud. I used adjustment layers to desaturate the wing and lighten it. I applied a layer mask to blend the feathers into the clouds. And I applied the Screen blend mode to lighten the wing shape over the clouds. Lastly, I flipped the entire image horizontally to make what would be the “front” face the right to set the direction of the motion as if we were reading it from left to right.