Birds took over my life. This is a fact. I love watching them, drawing them and learning more and more about them.
I think this is why, for a really long time, I felt so bad any time I wanted to draw something else. Sometimes, I get this urge to draw something, something non avian related, and because birds have become my business card, I always feel like drawing anything else is a waste of time and energy.
But the truth is that drawing has been in my life longer than birds. And drawing, even if not birds, will always improve my skill.
So I would like to show you some of those illustrations.
Posada Del Candil
This is actually one of the most recent ones. While I was in Spain, as part of The Break, we stayed in this amazing cute place called Posada Del Candil. This is an eco tourism hotel, imagined and constructed by this amazing couple: Javier and Peppa.
The Posada is located in Serón, which is as beautiful as remote, so when it came time for us to think about something to give our lovely hosts, our options were quite limited.
As the artist of the group, it was suggested that I could draw a card for them, and then we could all sign it and leave some lovely messages for them. Well what is more appropriate then an illustration of their dream?
This illustration was done using Micro pigment liners and a brush pen. I have to say that I was quite surprised at how fast I managed to do it, and how it turned out, as I have always done more organic subjects such as plants or animals.
Harakkanautti
For those that don’t know, I love playing videogames. I have always played on PC so when we got a PS5 I needed to create an account, a name and an avatar.
For a while all of these were nothing special, but after talking to a friend and coming across the most amazing name, Harakkanautti, I needed to create an avatar to match. But what is a Harakkanautti you might ask. Well… birds are coming into the picture but not quite. Harakka is the Finnish name for Magpie, which is one of my favorite birds. Nauti which means a voyager, a traveler.
On such a PS5 (and also on PC) one of my favorite games is space related so I had to pay homage to something I love. Hence a traveler magpie comes to be!
You might be saying “well this is a bird”, and you would be correct. But this is a cartoon, space bird, done digitally. Everything that is not my strong suit. So I think it counts.
Enchanted Sauna
This one you may already know as it has been shown in a previous blog post. If you know it, you can scroll along, if not, let me tell you about it.
This year, when my husband and I took a week-long vacation in a cabin “village”, I took some art supplies as I always do. But, as per usual, I did not take what I would end up wanting to use: Watercolors. Luckily, because of a really badly scheduled appointment, I had to come back home for the day, so I grabbed my watercolors and a mix media notebook.
This urge to paint something with watercolor came after I found the most adorable saunas at our cabin “village”. They look straight out of a fairy tale. I could almost see the little fairies using those buildings as houses, with their mushroom hats. Now THIS is completely out of my comfort zone.
I thought that drawing all that would be more stressful than fun, so I compromised and did a cute little sauna building, with a more magical atmosphere, without the fairies.
At the end I feel like I messed up by trying to add those black shadow trees, but once they were started there was little I could do so I just rolled with it. Live and learn I guess.
Flowers
Flowers and plants was how I (re)started my drawing journey. When I grabbed the pencil again after years of barely using it, plants were my favorite subject. To this day I still enjoy drawing plants and flowers, with or without birds.
During the pandemic, when I dedicated more time to drawing once again, I was trying to conquer my fear of digital (spoiler alert, is still here) by drawing something that I was quite comfortable with: flowers. This is a great way to practice a medium that I’m not that used to, as it takes a bit of the stress away.
I was quite proud of some of the flowers I made, and others not so much. The thing that frustrates me the most is the time that I take to finish a digital piece, since I’m not so efficient at this medium.
These are my favorite ones that I still like to share to this day. What flowers are they? I have no idea. My interest in flowers goes way below my interest for birds so usually I just draw the ones that I found online and think they are pretty (ahahahha).
And that’s it for now, some of my non-bird illustrations. I realized that by doing this, I set my creativity a bit more free, and allow me to cultivate my love for drawing birds without feeling so much pressure. Will I share these illustrations anywhere? Maybe on my Behance, who knows. But I will remain my professional focus on birds 💛