can’t help myself…

The process from painting to scan to logbook image is quite involved, and I am working my way through all my illustrations to standardise them. This takes quite a while, as the bird image needs to be saved as a separate layer from the base, then the background is swept with either white or my signature blue colour, and then rendered to the correct size. With the birds that are painted onto white paper, and then need a white background, I don’t have to be too exact as the white background is really just needed to clean up any marks, and make sure that the majority of it is the same colour. I skirt round the feet and other fiddly bits though, but I don’t have this luxury with the birds needing a blue background. These need all the details outlined, so everything is lifted onto the layer in one piece.

There’s a short clip of this clip here.

I realised that I can save the top layer (ie just the outlined bird) as an image in its own right. There is a genuine design reason for this – more on that in a later post – but in the meantime I wanted to see if the birds actually worked on their own, so to speak. I thought it would give me more flexibility with the illustrations. December and January are very quiet so I’m going to focus on my own work and portfolio while everyone hunkers down for the holidays, and the aftermath thereof.

In the absence of anything official to use, I uploaded a couple of my own photos and then had a play around:

Barn Swallows and a Black-headed Gull hanging out at Lake Michigan. Relatively sensible? Hmm, let’s find another landscape and try some other birds…

But no, it was too tempting:

Sorry…