Our family relocated and much of my retired time has been taken up with getting things settled. I have completed many works and have many in progress. I tend to work on multiple pieces to avoid for me what I call art fatigue…too much of one color, texture, detail., etc. Bouncing around helps me “keep fresh”. Anyway this is one of the pieces I did of a Killdeer. They nest early in the year on this river stone parking lot. A you might imagine doing all these stones might have called for taking breaks. I did do the final edit in Photoshop using it to apply a blur gradient in both foreground and background to simulate a short Depth of Field lens effect
I’ve encountered a number of those birds before. The first time, I saw one jump out of the tall grass in front of me, chirping and flailing a broken wing. Being a big dumb animal, I approached it thinking I could help, only he always manged to stay out of reach.
Turns out it’s just an act they all do. They do it to keep all of the big dumb animals away from their roosting site.
Thanks for the comment - rocks - not so much frustration as trying to avoid burnout repetition. Nature is very random. If I do it for too long a stretch than I end up painting them all looking the same. I had an recording studio and one of the dangers of mixing down audio over a long period of time is “ear fatique”, which is when you stop hearing the very subtle difference in sound. So I translate that over to my art in the form of avoiding “eye fatigue”.
LOL - I didn’t think of that, guess I concentrating to hard on making sure I keep them random in shape and color. This is a progress image, I put the rocks in in sudo rows applying their shape by either highlight or shadow.
@BHiggins this is stunning! What an amazing piece, I can’t stop looking at all these little details so beautifully drawn… thank you for posting this and making us all smile ツ
Congratulations! Your artwork has been inducted into the featured artwork gallery row.
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@sooz
Thank you for the honor -
Name: Barry Higgins
Alt Text - I am a retired age, self taught wildlife artist, and wildlife photographer (use my own references) but have been doing art since childhood. Up until two yers ago I used traditional mediums of all types exclusively. My first trial of digital art was with a tablet based app but out grew the memory limitations fairly quickly and moved to Krita on the desktop. As I am not a graphics artist my approach to my work is based more on methods used by traditional artists and few layers. I really feel digital art has upped my art game and sped up production. Color mixing, matching, and blending is a dream with the best eraser in the world. Digital painting can duplicate nearly any physical medium technic I have ever used. My painting is purely for personal enjoyment with two side benefits educating the public to the wonders and beauty of the natural world, and showing traditional artists that digital is a valid art form even in fine arts.
