Pattern making + Affinity Designer practice + favorite theme: Birds -> this!

when art is fine – by Steven Bagatzky
a blog about illustration, concept art and other topics
depictions of birds
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.
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.
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.
It’s been a while since I posted a bird. This one wasn’t based on a specific bird, it’s one of a few sketches I did exploring further simplification and abstraction of general bird shapes.