When I first started birding I thought I would like to keep my life list with pictures of the birds as I added them to my life list. I had just bought our families first computer, a Sony Viao . I did not have a nice camera since my first Nikon was accidentally baptized in the ocean by immersion while we were living in the Philippines in the mid 80's. I started drawing the birds using the Paint program on Windows.
Our old Sony had long ago bit the dust and had been sitting on a shelf in the basement for years until a few months ago when I hauled it off to be recycled. I was quite sad because I had a lot of important files on that computer I thought were lost for good including all my bird drawings.
The night before I took it to the recycling I called my son Spencer the computer genius and asked if there was anyway to salvage the files from the hard drive of the old computer. He came over and took it out and a few days later brought in a flash drive and loaded my old files including my long lost pictures on to my Mac. These drawing were very important to me in the early days of being a naturalist at Farmington Bay and I used them to teach bird ID classes as well as scout merit badge and conservation classes. I drew the pictures in a way that accentuated their field marks. Some of them I drew slow and carefully others I popped out in a few hours. I am going to share some of those pictures here.
Black-headed Grosbeak
This one dates me, the Spotted Towhee was still known as the Rufous-sided Towhee at that time
Clarks Grebe
This is the picture I am most proud of because I took the time to detail the feather markings. This picture took well over a month to draw. The Great Horned Owl
American Avocet
Black-necked Stilt
Great Blue Heron
Killdeer
Great Egret
Snowy Egret
Belted Kingfisher
Marbled Godwit
American White Pelican, I drew this picture in just a few minutes because I was asked to have one in a presentation I was giving to some school teachers and they wanted pictures of the birds that give the Great Salt Lake the designation as a Western Hemisphere Shorebird preserve, and I didn't have a picture of a pelican at that time so I quickly drew this.
Wilson's Phalarope
I never did finish this picture of the Downy Woodpecker
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Pinyon Jay
I eventually got more and more busy and found less time and patients to draw birds on my computer so I never completed the male Northern Harrier so instead I took what I had and spliced it into the picture I had already drawn of the female.
These are just a few of pictures I drew on my old computer using Paint and a mouse only. I will post more later on.
1 comment:
Steve, You obviously have a great talent with a computer paint program. How about painting the old fashioned way with brush and paint?
I have intended to try to complete a painting using only my basic photo editing program. The tools ought to be sufficient, but finding the time is the challenge. I did create a Blue-gray Tanager's beak that was covered by a leaf. After I finished it looked like the bird's beak was in front of the leaf.
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