While out on a walk today, I saw a peculiar bird doing a little dance by the edge of the water and actually swimming down under water. Apparently, these birds are not all that uncommon, but it was my first time seeing one.
I do not consider myself a birder or a bird person – but it is another reason to carry a camera with me and get outside. And I do have the Merlin app on my phone to identify birds by their calls and songs or by a photo, and I think that’s also interesting and fun sometimes.
I’ve recently been dabbling in digital tools as part of the creative process. Below are a few of examples of how I used photography and digital image processing to achieve something that I think feels a little different.
Fall is a short, but magical time of the year.
For this drawing I used a fountain pen with a bent nib – to be able to color in large areas at a time. The foreground is dark with detailed leaves and gradually transitions to light through a few ripples in the water with the trunks of a few trees.
I would be lying if I said this was completely my original thought. It is based on a photo that I took, which was in turn inspired by an M.C. Escher print, which was included in a biography about the artist that I have kept in my possession since I was a teenager. I was recently re-reading this book to help me fall asleep at night – something it does very well because it is almost as dryly written as a history textbook.
Here are a few sketches from my sketchbook from a recent trip home to Alabama.
Here’s a quick sketch of the beach from memory with no references used, drawn with pencil in my traveler’s sketchbook. When you’re drawing a place, it almost feels like you’re at that place. I probably could have spent more time, but I really just wanted to get the idea on paper as fast as I could.
