when art is fine – by Steven Bagatzky
a blog about illustration, concept art and other topics
I really only chose to do a painting of this bird because I thought its name was funny. Also, it fits into the sequence. After doing the Starling illustration, I figured I might as well try to cover the seasons of a new year. The Great Tit for January and the Starling kicks off the song contest in February, Chiffchaff for march … and so on. I haven’t decided yet which bird I’ll do next.
I felt like doing some type- and graphic design exploration. Some of these I drew, and some were done using existing typefaces.
The “Star | Common Starling” is one of those birds I have a love/hate relationship with as a visual person. I can never decide whether I like it or not. There’s no harmony between areas of rest and areas of detail. Its base color is black, yet it’s slightly iridescent. It’s somewhat “too much” for me. And all that detail makes it harder to appreciate the forms and shapes.
So for this exploration, I focused on capturing the glitter bomb impression I got from that bird.
Needed to do some comfort-doodling today, so I decided to do a bird. Haven’t done one in ~2-3 years, I think. I was also inspired by all the bird photography that’s populating my Mastodon feed. I randomly picked a bird from one of my books and landed on the Feldlerche / common sky lark.
I did some more experiments, and because I don’t plan on doing with those files I decided to bundle them up and use this occasion to finally set up a gumroad-store. You can be the first one to purchase this set of vibrantly stylish abstract images and use it as your phone wallpaper or something else.
Here’s the link to the item: Gumroad-link (external)
Experiments using Photoshops Blur & Threshold filters.
Todays writing practice is once again a very short pulpy story. Reading time ~9min.
Hunan Jag’s footsteps sounded out loudly around him. Despite his best efforts, his impressive physique just was not suitable for quiet movement. It couldn’t be helped; it was just one of the costs one had to pay when one wanted to be as strong as Hunan was. It had never bothered him in the past that he was not as stealthy as others, but here, now, in this place, Hunan noticed and wished it was different.
The birds had stopped their songs and calls. The living maze of browns and greens, usually full of life, had turned deathly silent as Hunan got closer to his goal: the ancient temple of Ruk.
“Well, this isn’t ominous at all, is it?” He thought to himself as he heard another branch loudly splintering apart under his weight, reverberating through the jungle. “Not ominous at all.”
Continue reading “Hunan and the temple beast”
Monday is always the slowest day of the week currently. Got a doctor’s appointment which takes a 2-3h chunk out of the day. On Mondays, I thus focus I focus on chill learning and (attempts at) writing.
Last week I spent a couple of hours learning about Affinity Designer, trying and playing with it. I actively watched ~1h of an Udemy course on Design Thinking. I actively engaged with other people’s art for a couple of hours, I did one larger illustration, which included a little bit of experimentation, I experimented with drawing typography, and I did a couple of dozen illustration and character sketches, of which I cleaned up the following ten. …
And still, when I got up this morning, I thought, “I didn’t do anything last week. I have to push harder this week. I’m not doing anything worthwhile. I’m not learning.”
