Birdtober, Blogtober, or Inktober?

It’s that time of year. I really enjoy writing my blog, and sharing what I’m up to, especially as social media is such a lottery these days regarding exposure. Autumn is my favourite time of year, and it’s cool enough in my room to paint. October is the traditional month for Blogtober, and Inktober, which after the latter lost favour after the creator copyrighted the concept, there are now a load of other art-based “tobers” and I might do Birdtober this year. This was created by Andrea Holmes, and as she’s based in Texas, they are US birds but there is an international version. After my foray into American birds with the Mogollon Wildway project I’m quite excited to paint some, although I was thinking if I drew a Birdtober bird in ink, and posted it every day I could amalgamate all three…

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I have rearranged my loft space to take advantage of more natural light, and I have a new laptop which is rapidly becoming my favourite thing in the world as it’s so fast and responsive and can handle my Adobe software without flinching, so I have been playing around a lot with that. I realised with the birdwatching logbooks, that the blue background I use is not really bright enough. I’ve been swapping some of the illustrations over to a background which is a grey-blue-green and actually the colour I use on all my branding, so feels appropriate. It looks more green here but in CMYK and when printed it’s more muted. The white shows up much more effectively and as I have saved most of the birds as Photoshop files with the layers intact, it’s easy enough to swipe over the background with the new colour.

I’ve also made some greetings cards from these little paintings I did last year. I wonder if they might be a bit gloomy but I through they would be good for the various markets I’ve got coming up. I ordered them from MOO as their cards are good quality.

As I was rummaging through my art supplies I came across some card blanks which I had purchased for another project years ago, and thought I’d experiment with some small paintings. I had some leftover black gouache from a painting I’ve done for my friend, and so used it to paint a little Magpie:

I might do some Robins and other popular birds.