I was taking garden/flower pictures the other day when by happenstance a cardinal came by to eat. I turned my camera towards the bird and took as many pictures as possible. This image is the best of the lot, and I’m quite happy with the results. The amount of post-processing in Photoshop was minimal, consisting of cropping, removing a few loose strands of rope holding the feeder, and minimizing a yellow hue which dominated the image. All this took around a minute in total.
Over the past couple of months I’ve decided to dedicate some of my spare time to sketching. Coming up with character designs for Steve the Cat proved unnecessarily difficult and I realised I needed to re-hone and practise my drawing skills. My feeling is you have to know how to draw something realistically before you can draw a stylized/cartoon version. I bought a cheap sketching guidebook, a pack of pencils, and looked through old pictures I’ve taken for inspiration. This sketch is based from a picture I took of a Canadian goose in Springbank Park, London, Ontario. Hopefully there will be more to follow. I also might update my progress on the Supermarine Spitfire, which has been on the back burner for a while.
Here’s the original photo I used for the drawing.
