Another bird drawing

I’m loving birds at the moment, apparently 😀 Maybe it’s a moving-into-a-house-with-a-garden thing. Today I made a redrawing in Gimp of a crow from the autumn of 2019. Here’s the result:

He seems to be quite content with his new look.

We actually have a gang of young crows in the garden at the moment who party early in the mornings!

There’s a flat roof above our bedroom, and in the beginning I thought a cat or other bigger animal was running around up there. But it turns out it was a bunch of crows jumping around eating cherries from our trees and laughing. There might not be any cherries left for us humans to eat later in summer.

But what the heck, I love having birds in the garden. How can you not – look at that cute, feathery face!

The old crow

The original version of the drawing was based on a crow I saw in the park when we lived in the city.

If you’ve been following for a while, you might remember that I made a 1-minute video of the drawing process:

I also drew the original digitally using my Wacom tablet + Adobe Illustrator. I still use the same tablet btw. I have an Intuos Art which is one of the smaller, cheaper drawing tablets. I don’t know if they still make that model, but I’m really happy with it. It took maybe a year to get properly comfortable drawing with it, and I’m definitely still improving.

Redrawing drawings

I think I’ll do more redrawings during my summer staycation. It’s also something I’ve done a couple of times before in drawing videos – check them out here:

I can recommend redrawing an older drawing, if you – like me – sometimes struggle to think of something to draw, but have creative motivation and the time to practice a new technique. It’s really fun!

Another bird drawing

Trying to colour a bird

I wanted to start using more colours in my drawings – and took it out on this bird:

This took me about 5 hours to draw!

I used the free programme Gimp to try something other than Adobe Illustrator. Learning to use a new programme and work with colours at the same time is definitely a challenge. But so far I’m liking the programme a lot.

All weekend, I’ve been switching between enjoying the process and being furiously frustrated when the drawing doesn’t do what I want.

I’ve obviously made coloured illustrations before, but it’s mostly been based off of my line art. Meaning that the colours were added as an extra thing at the end and not really taken center stage in my creative process. If that makes sense.

I still like doodling

I’ll probably continue to make mostly line art doodles, maybe because I’m a very impatient person in my core. But I really enjoy looking at other artists’ colourful drawings and paintings, so I want to try to include coloured art whenever I’m motivated.

Also, I know I mostly spell colour the British way, even though I probably also use American English spelling at other times. I care about spelling at work, but on here it will probably continue to be all over the place, since I can’t really be bothered to choose 😀 Noone asked, but there it is.

Trying to colour a bird

Pizza Gull

Possibly a distant relative (somehow) to the famous Pizza Rat:

pizza gull with pizza july
“Oooh, mushroom – my favourite!”

He lives in Denmark, and you’ll recognize him by his very straight legs (’cause I forgot that sea gulls have knees).

At first I coloured Pizza Gull white, because I also forgot that sea gulls have grey wings and a black tail (even though I see them every day flying around the city looking for pizza and other goodies!).

pizza gull with pizza
“Quack!”

The pale gull looked more like a duck, so I decided to give him some more nature-like colours.

 

Pizza Gull