Sometimes “inspiration” really just means to look at something you’ve seen already multiple times again, but this time you see something different.

As I got out of the shower I looked out the window which had fogged up due to me enjoying warm water on my skin while we had just seen some snow coming down a few minutes earlier. The view out of the bathroom window isn’t very inspiring by itself, there’s the wall of the next house a few meters away and some branches hanging from a tree which sits between the two houses. I’ve seen that view for 3 years on an almost daily basis and I don’t get excited about it, usually. However for some reason this time my brain made me realize and actively consider that there is a wall, and yes there are tree branches – but have you noticed how everything looks like it’s 2D. It’s all flat, there’s no volume to it. Whatever chemistry happened in my brain at that point took those thoughts and turned it into multiple ideas for artworks.
This was one of the ideas and the most straight-forward one. So everything you need to know is already in the first image here. The ref-photo I took a couple minutes after the post-shower-epithany and the quick composition doodle that followed after.

I knew I would be going for a simple composition and color-theme on this image. Mostly bright greys to give the impression of mist & fog, but with a little bit darker values on the branches and the bird. I knew that I’d need a bird with a colored pattern to it’s feathering and looking through the bird guidebooks I found the “Balkan-Bartgrasmücke – Subalpine Warbler”. I liked the red’ish chest coloration but ultimately I decided to use this bird because I saw an opportunity in its head-shapes.

So the next step was to lay down the base-shapes without any detailling.

(more…)

I noticed this bird – a Stachelschwanzsegler – White-throated Needletail – because in the guidebook it’s bodily appearance was unflatteringly described as something looking between a flying barrel and a cigar. Looking for more information on this bird online I found out that it can travel up to 105mph | 170kmh. While not the fastest bird this is still pretty fast and as far as I know faster than the other swift-type birds.

Upon reading of its travel speeds, I remembered poster designs for the Porsche racing series and wondered if I could create something similar for this bird. Thus I scribbled down the following thumbnails.

I wasn’t particularly patient that day so I jumped straight into creating the illustration. Draw the bird, draw the rest of the image. Done.

Almost.

(more…)

This illustration snuck up to me, took me hostage and didn’t let me go until I got it out of the system.
I had planned to work on something different that day, but while walking up to the workstation, the idea for this artwork came to my mind. Like I usually do I made a quick sketch, added a couple of notes, saved the file to be reopened at a later date and opened the illustration I had planned for that day. But my mind kept drifting back to this one.
And so I reopened this one, closed the other one, picked up the guidebook to look for a bird to use for this idea, decided on the “Tannenhäher – Spotted Nutcracker” and then went to work.

There was very little experimentation on this artwork. I spent some time figuring out the initial bird shape – what to simplify, where to use curves vs. straight lines etc.

(more…)

Of this new series of bird-inspired artworks this was the second one I started and while I had very little trouble drawing the bird itself – a Großer Brachvogel – Eurasian curlew – the overall image wasn’t so straightforward. It went from painterly to Charley Harper flat to what it is now. You’ll see exactly what I mean in the following steps.

based on this initial sketch next I blocked out base shapes and painted in the background. Initially I thought to contrast the graphic shapes of the bird with a dry brush-like look for the background. The curlew was to stand in shallow water and a streak of sunlight was to hit both the bird and the seagrass behind him.

(more…)

While on a short vacation between christmas and new years we visited a small bookshop where I happened to pick up a guide book to birds. Despite having done a few artworks on birds I still don’t really know much about birds, not really at least. I still struggle to recognize even those birds I’ve created artworks about for example, but I also don’t or didn’t have any idea about how many different birds exist. How the different birds are actually different from each other and so on because when looking at pictures of birds on the internet, you don’t really get that kind of information. You get a picture and that’s it. Hopefully I will learn more about birds using this book though right now I’m mostly using it as an artbook because damn the illustrations in there are gorgous.

This wan’t the first bird to spark my interest, more like the third, however it was the first for which I had a clear idea for an artwork right after seeing it. Most of the time I simply start doodling because I like a certain feature about a bird and then construct an image around it, not so with this Schwarzspecht – Black Woodpecker.

Given it’s name and overall black feathering I thought it fitting to create an image which overall would largely be black or very dark, and use the red accent on the birds head to make the bird pop off the background and possibly give it something mysterious or even menacing. So that’s what I blocked out next:

(more…)