black-capped chickadee song
I have a romanticized notion of birdsongs. Truth be told, I can very seldom actually tell what song belongs to what bird. I grew up the child of birdwatchers, so, this irritates my mother to no end. The only birdsong I can ever discern is robins (well, okay, and crows, and well, red-winged blackbirds), but that’s because they don’t sing so much as they scream…
Anyhow, this picture is the end result of some random comment from a forum thread.
It started with my etsy banner. As you may know, I have an etsy shop: sarahkdesigns. There I sell prints of my illustrations and digital collages, and the occasional watercolor. My work tends to be very colorful and usually incorporates flowers or birds, or both, or some aspect of nature…
So, I made myself a summer banner: something vivid, colorful, and with some summer birds and plants:
To make a long story short, I know the banner is obnoxiously full of bright saturated color, and is visually busy. Graphically, it is literally made out of a scan of one of my paintings and birds & flowers from a scan of another of my paintings. And every once in a while, I’m in need of some attention and post in those critique me threads in the critique forums — and the only thing that ever got any comments was, of course, my banner. I believe someone told me that it didn’t match the items in my shop (to which I thought, hey: click on page 2).
I’m not thin-skinned, or easily swayed, but eventually, as the days get shorter and slightly colder (we refer to that as free air conditioning) — it was time for a new banner.
And so, I sat down at the computer and pulled the chickadee layer out of chickadee love song, and the musical notes from bluebird song and played around until I had something that was whimsical and end of summery looking.
And then I thought, hey, that would look cool as a square print with a shadow border… And so, I sat down at the computer again and opened up all the files, and went searching for just the right photo of the sky… did some editing, added some layering effects, toggled some color, and voila: new print!
(Actually, new print series… check out sarahkdesigns this week for other birdsongs)
I have a romanticized notion of birdsongs. Truth be told, I can very seldom actually tell what song belongs to what bird. I grew up the child of birdwatchers, so, this irritates my mother to no end. The only birdsong I can ever discern is robins (well, okay, and crows, and well, red-winged blackbirds), but that’s because they don’t sing so much as they scream…
Anyhow, this picture is the end result of some random comment from a forum thread.
It started with my etsy banner. As you may know, I have an etsy shop: sarahkdesigns. There I sell prints of my illustrations and digital collages, and the occasional watercolor. My work tends to be very colorful and usually incorporates flowers or birds, or both, or some aspect of nature…
So, I made myself a summer banner: something vivid, colorful, and with some summer birds and plants:
To make a long story short, I know the banner is obnoxiously full of bright saturated color, and is visually busy. Graphically, it is literally made out of a scan of one of my paintings and birds & flowers from a scan of another of my paintings. And every once in a while, I’m in need of some attention and post in those critique me threads in the critique forums — and the only thing that ever got any comments was, of course, my banner. I believe someone told me that it didn’t match the items in my shop (to which I thought, hey: click on page 2).
I’m not thin-skinned, or easily swayed, but eventually, as the days get shorter and slightly colder (we refer to that as free air conditioning) — it was time for a new banner.
And so, I sat down at the computer and pulled the chickadee layer out of chickadee love song, and the musical notes from bluebird song and played around until I had something that was whimsical and end of summery looking.
And then I thought, hey, that would look cool as a square print with a shadow border… And so, I sat down at the computer again and opened up all the files, and went searching for just the right photo of the sky… did some editing, added some layering effects, toggled some color, and voila: new print!
(Actually, new print series… check out sarahkdesigns this week for other birdsongs)
4 comments:
Both banners are amazing!! Though I think the chickadee one is my favorite. Not quite as busy. But lof the other one too!
Yeah I agree I like both banners. Everyone loves chichadees.
Oh wow! I went to your shop and it looks beautiful and compliments your work.
When designing my banner, I also looked into the rest of the website.. Etsy is so clean ... I too wanted to look clean and polished.. so I unconsciously adopted a similar shade of blue that they use in their text... which I've been stuck with ever since now!
So cute.. i love your little chickadee! I am horrible at bird songs too... I will add "seagull" "crow" and "owl" to my list as being easily identifiable. ;)
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