Animal Alphabets: Birds

I recently completed the Birds round of Animal Alphabets over on Twitter. Twenty six weeks of birds, one for each letter of the alphabet - all done in Procreate on my iPad Pro. 

Some of them are more finished than others, depending on how much time I had in any given week. See below the cut for a closer look at some of my favourites:

Animal Alphabets: Sea Life

I completed two rounds of Animal Alphabets over on Twitter in the past year. Here is the first set: Sea Life. 

See below the cut for a closer look at a few of my favourites:

Pink-Headed Fruit Dover

When Colour Collective rolls around and I have no time (and also a massive headache), birds are always a good subject matter. For the 'Opera Rose' prompt I chose a pink-headed fruit dove, endemic to Indonesia. Birds have such amazing colouring!

This took about an hour and a half, although that was longer than necessary as my tablet froze and ate my last save (I'm positive I had saved more recently, my my Wacom does like to eat saves. You think you're safe and saved up until five minutes ago, but no, turns out Photoshop is going to recover the file as it was 40 minutes ago...)

Adobe Photoshop 2019 on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro 13" 

Serenity

This year Colour Collective is recycling favourite old colours from previous years. A lot of the time I have no idea what I drew for any specific colour, but I did remember my illustration for 'Serenity'. It was two Indian girls bathing a baby elephant at dusk, done almost exactly three years ago. It makes me cringe now, as old art has a habit of doing, and I briefly considered reworking it... until I realised that people with as many projects and deadlines on the go as me do not have that kind of luxury. So I kept the baby elephant and ditched everything else. Gosh, my work has got simpler!

I threw this together very quickly, it probably took less than an hour, and it needs more work, really, but for the time I had, it is enough. I do like my little elephant, and it was a lovely peaceful scene to work on while I myself was not feeling at all peaceful with everything I had to do! I try to carve out time to do both Colour Collective and Animal Alphabets each week, with a time limit of an hour, because it's important to do some drawing that isn't work-related, just for mental health (if nothing else, it doesn't have to be perfect!), and it keeps my social media from completely atrophying while I work on things I can't share. 

Adobe Photoshop CC2019 on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro 13"

Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo...

... listening to the goss.

Adobe Photoshop CC2018 on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro

Hummingbird

More bird practice. I had a horrible cold, and I'd been working all day and just wanted something cute to draw before bed.

Adobe Photoshop CC2018 on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro

Budgies and Brahma Hens

Bird practice. I needed something fun to wind down before bed during a week of deadlines and colds and blah. 

A budgie:

And a very grumpy Brahma hen, referenced from my book 'Extra Extraordinary Chickens' (Green-Armytage) 

Adobe Photoshop CC2018 on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro

Toucan!

I've been practicing birds, and so here is a toucan!

Adobe Photoshop CC2018 on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro

Robin Hood

Last year I did a few Robin Hood themed illustrations for Colour Collective, while the colours miraculously worked with the theme. I don't know how that happened! Where was the hot pink to throw a spanner in my works?

While we were in the UK, I (briefly) saw a weasel. I was amazed by how small it was, I'd always thought they were bigger. So naturally I had to draw one, and I thought Robin Hood would make an ideal weasel. He's always getting out of sticky situations. And the Colour Collective colour was 'Lincoln Green'. Meant to be!



Then 'Scheveningen Yellow Light' was the next colour, and I thought Maid Marian, with her original association with May Day, should be frolicking amongst the daffodils. We saw a lot of daffodils on holiday.



And then the next colour was 'Seashell', which turned out to be the perfect colour for mushrooms. Friar Tuck seemed to me to be perfect as a mole. We didn't see any moles on holiday (I don't think it's usual to see any!) but we did see some molehills.

Chattering Lories

For Colour Collective's 'Cardinal Red' prompt, I was going to go very uninspired and draw some cardinal birds. But then my mother reminded me of lories. I can't think why I had forgotten about them, I was only in the Lory House at Jurong Bird Park two months ago! So I changed my plan and chose chattering lories, endemic to North Maluku, Indonesia. They are considered vulnerable in the wild due to illegal trapping.

Adobe Photoshop CC2018 on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro. A little over two hours.

Australian Animals

Here are some sketches of various Australian animals, which I've been doing as bedtime wind-downs. I like to have a little time before bed just to draw something pointless. 

This is a forty-spotted pardalote, endangered and endemic to a small area of Tasmania. I hadn't heard of them, but I saw them on Gardening Australia and they were so cute. They also matched perfectly with Colour Collective's 'Turmeric' prompt, so I included it as a bonus CC as well. 

Here is a numbat. They are also endangered, and native to Western Australia. Obviously I had heard of numbats. A lot. I love them.

A Tasmanian echidna. I saw one on David Attenborough's Tasmania and absolutely fell in love with it, so cute. I was filled with a desire to needle felt one, but I totally don't have felting time right now, so a quick sketch was the best I was going to get:

More below the cut:

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.

SCBWI Draw This: Light

I had a bit of downtime, and thought I would take part in the monthly 'SCBWI Draw This' prompt. The theme was 'light', and I used it as an opportunity to practice perspective with no direct reference. To make my life harder, I chose to do 3-point perspective, which is the type I am the worst at - but hey, I'm not going to get better unless I practice, am I?

I thought it would be fun to have several references to 'light' in my illustration - moonlight, candle light, light as a feather, light as air...

Head below the cut to see the truly horrible sketch I did to try out the general idea, before I got my act together and made it pretty:

Makulu

Here's a quick sketch I did in memory of Makulu, the baby Rothschild's giraffe immortalised in Don D'Raine's 1995 The Kiss photograph. His mother Misha died in 2016, and Makulu was put down in early November, aged 23, due to deteriorating health. 

Makulu was born in Perth Zoo, so I have a fondness for him, although he was moved to Melbourne in 1996. He and his mate Twiga had 58 descendants. 

Adobe Photoshop CC2019 - I can't remember how long it took, but definitely under an hour!

Snack Time

I had a bit of creative block when it came to Colour Collective's 'Amethyst' prompt. I love purple, and amethyst is my birthstone... but I was having trouble coming up with something. So, as I had been drawing birds, I gooded purple birds and discovered Lilac Breasted Rollers. I think we can all agree that they look pretty fabulous. I hadn't heard of them before. You learn something every day!

I added some African daisies for some extra purple, and voila. A Colour Collective Post!

Adobe Photoshop CC2018 on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro. It took about 2 hours. 

Snail Cosy

I was very busy when it came time for Colour Collective 'Basalt Grey', so I took a quick sketch I'd done earlier in the week and prettified it a bit.

Here's that original sketch, inspired by a photo my friend Makenzi linked me to when I was feeling a bit down, of a snail cosy crocheted by Katie Bradley:

Adobe Photoshop CC2018 on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro. I spent an hour to an hour and a half on the Colour Collective version and about 20 minutes on the original sketch.

Wattle Day

Wattle Day is the 1st September, so of course I had to draw something for it. Every year I get hayfever when the wattles come out, although I am informed that wattle pollen is too large to cause hayfever. Still, it's a lovely flower (and I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and assume that something else comes into flower at the same time and it is that that causes my hayfever). I chose to add a New Holland Honeyeater, partly for interest, partly because I've been having fun drawing birds lately anyway. 

Adobe Photoshop CC2018 on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro. I think it took about an hour, an hour and a half.

Dusk

I needed to do something calm and serene for Colour Collective's 'Eminence' prompt - my work that day featured animals being distressed by a bushfire, which naturally meant I had to google this subject... and all in all, I needed something as far from fire and distress as I could get. 

Which brings us to Antarctica. No fire there! 

Eminence is a lovely rich purple (the sort I wear a lot) and so perfect for dusky scenes. As is unfortunately usually the case with Colour Collective, it was done in a bit of a rush (I generally think of my CC posts as sketches. Sometimes I like them enough to work them up into full, finished illustrations)... but it did make me feel a lot happier. =) 

Adobe Photoshop CC2018 on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro

Swinging

Colour Collective's 'Amber' prompt made me think of wheat, and having got that far, it's a very small jump to 'harvest mouse'. (To be honest, I don't really need an excuse to draw a harvest mouse...or any mouse). A google search for 'harvest mouse' (as well as providing you with cute overload) will give you lots of mice climbing around plants, and sitting in their elaborate woven nests. For a kidlitart scenario, that naturally brings me to a mouse that has made its own little swing:

 

He doesn't stand out much, but that's okay, because harvest mice are supposed to be camouflaged, right? I added the poppies because it really needed a contrast to all that yellow and brown. 

I whipped this up in just an hour or two, almost exclusively using Kyle Webster's Gouache brushes (specifically the Gouache a Go Go and the Gouache Bonus Gritty Dry). Not super-refined or anything, I was in a hurry. 

Adobe Photoshop CC2018 on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro

Pen Pals

Colour Collective's 'Celeste' prompt came right at Easter... but I didn't want to do anything Easter-themed for it. The colour reminded me of ice, and eventually that ended up with this little set of pen pals. I don't know about you, but I always cringe when I see illustrations with penguins and polar bears in the same place - these two are definitely in their original habitats, but with their icy life experiences, I thought they'd make perfect pen pals!

Here's a look at them individually:

I rather like this little bear - I'm not sure I've ever drawn a polar bear before!

As tends to be my habit with Colour Collective, I threw these together very quickly, but I think I'd like to take them further one day. They can go in my files for when I have no inspiration and want to rework something. =)

Adobe Photoshop CC2018 on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro

About 2 hours total