This is the image I created for a training company to use for their Adobe Audition courses. Audition is an audio application, so I needed to create something to depict that. I chose a microphone because Adobe Audition is often used with podcasting – voila, a podcast microphone it would be!

I started by creating a cylinder (the base) and then another cylinder for the actual main sound component. I made the diameter of this slightly smaller so that I could ‘pull’ it into the base.

Then I drew a hatched pattern in Illustrator and applied this to the main top part. I created two pipe shapes and wrapped them around the top part. I added some horizontal cubes, shaped them as reinforcements and added these behind the pipes to give the illusion of sturdiness.

Then I moved all of the parts into situ and applied different shades and materials. I created the base shapes and applied a 3D printed pattern to them.

I then added the foam cover and rendered the image. Once done, I imported it into Photoshop and added noise, grain and blur to get the effect I wanted. Then I added the background, applied an inversed spherize and saved the final image as above.