Lovebirds

'Living Coral' is the Pantone Colour of the Year for 2019, and it was naturally also an early entry in the Colour Collective. It's such a vibrant colour, a favourite of mine anyway, and it was really tempting to do a detailed tropical underwater scene with lots of coral and fish and bubbles. But I had to be sensible; I'm busy, with two books on the go, and I'm running a bit behind because I was hideously sick with a sinus infection for a week. So detailed scenes were out of the question, I could only schedule in 1 hour for my Colour Collective - so I defaulted to birds. They're such nice, simple shapes. 

I chose lovebirds because a) they're cute and b) there was lots of opportunity to tone down the coral with green. It's summer here, I quite like to work with cool colours! And people seemed to like them, which was nice! 

And they were a big improvement on my previous week's effort (while sick with the aforementioned sinus infection). I'd dragged myself out of bed and thought I'd tentatively try doing a Colour Collective (tea green) to see if I was well enough to get back to work. I wasn't - a define lack of energy and purpose in my linework and colouring! I'll have to return to these ringneck parrots some other time and do them more justice. At the time, however, I just went back to bed. There was no point trying to do work if I was only going to have to redo it later! It's amazing how much being unwell can affect your drawing!

Adobe Photoshop CC2019 on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro. Each illustration took about one hour.