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when art is fine – by Steven Bagatzky
a blog about illustration, concept art and other topics
Posts only showing the final artwork with no documentation of the process or commentary about context or intent of the image.
This one never clicked. I’m not happy with the result, but it’s also not getting any better. I’ve been moving pixels around for a while now. I’ll let this one go as it is and probably redo it from the start at some point in the future.
For whatever reason, I found myself playing around with patterns this week. I first did a bunch of geometric stuff, but I was actually more drawn toward hand-drawn organic patterns. Here are the hand-drawn ones I have done so far.
You can click on the following below thumbnail to see the overview a bit larger.
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.