a post about posters

and my indecision

While my primary focus will be always be the birdwatching logbooks, it makes sense (as a freelancer) to look at other ways of using my skills to expand my potential earnings. I have reached a point where I get steady sales of the logbooks across my stockists, but of course that side of things is technically out of my hands, as I can’t control the numbers sold.

I am confident about making poster versions of the birdwatching logbooks as it’s kinda like the centre-page spreads, but doing an actual illustrated project is totally different, so I decided to challenge myself with the rewilding poster idea mentioned in this post here.

Suffice to say that despite a few attempts, I realised I simply do not have the knowledge of how to visually communicate something from scratch, but that in itself was a really useful exercise as it’s good to have the opportunity to properly try something, but although I had some good ideas they kept getting stuck, and my momentum and vision would just evaporate.

So, scrap that.

meanwhile…

I heard back from Mossy Earth about the bird poster for their project in Ecuador, and I have some amazing species to paint. I finally get a legitimate reason to paint a couple of toucans and macaws, as well as a bunch of other birds I have never heard of. It really brought home why I love making the logbooks: I get to acquaint myself with birds that otherwise I wouldn’t get to meet, and while this one will be just paintings rather than info too, it’s still necessitates doing some research and watching videos of the birds in question to get the jizz of them.

designing the poster

I can’t use my usual circles as so many of the birds are too long to fit without me contorting them, so I think I might have to use ovals instead. I could use a border, so a bit like a die-cut sticker, but I would like to put the name of the bird around the edge of the oval, as with the logbooks, so I think I will need a decent space as some have long names; the text for the Crimson-crested Woodpecker is going to end up joining up with itself!

the background

I will do a relatively plain background as I will be sitting the birds over the top. I have to work out final the size of the poster so I can get the resolution correct, and even though I am not going to be printing these for the project – I’ll just send the artwork – I am quite keen to get one printed for myself, and to check how they come out. I’d like to offer these posters to other projects, hence why I’m offering to do this one as a practice one so I need to see how they actually turn out.

I’m excited to get started! Here are some Keel-billed Toucans I drew a while ago.