bird

Red Siskin

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It is Avian August / Blaugust, the time of year when my blog rises briefly from the dead! Today I drew the first bird from Cookiedove’s prompt list; the Red Siskin.

It’s been a while since I’ve done digital art, partly because it was a bit of a pain to find a good groove to get into it. My laptop has only USB C ports so plugging in a tablet always ends up feeling like more trouble than it’s worth. There also wasn’t really a designated “tablet” space as such in the house, which would lead me to trying to draw from the couch in rather awkward ways.

I’ve recently had my PC repaired, and now have my large tablet permanently plugged into it. I had to pull out some old drivers to get it running but it works and I’m thinking that Avian August will be a great way to get back into some digital pieces without feeling any pressure about quality.

Not sure what my plans are going to be for the rest of the month, but like other years I figure I’ll start the month off on a good footing and if things take a hold from there we’ll continue, but if they don’t then again, no pressure.

Good luck to all the other artists and bloggers out there!

Northern Cardinal

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One of the first watercolour brooches I experimented with was of a cardinal, so I thought that for today’s Avian August prompt I would revisit the laser cutter.

Somehow I nailed the design on the first sketch:

And from there I could see that the piece would work either as a painted or acrylic piece!

There was a slight tricky bit to solve with how to depict the eye in the acrylic version – would the whole face piece be black acrylic and the white parts painted in? I instead opted to cut the eye out of white acrylic and to etch a section into that that I painted black.

Image

I didn’t realise how dark my sheet of red acrylic was but I didn’t have any alternatives on hand so it’ll have to do. I really like how this little cute birb came out, and it was another speed lasercut build which has me thinking that I might spend September with the aim to do more regular laser work……….