Connecticut-The American Robin

It's done!  Finally!  This is by far the longest project that I have undertaken so far.  I am glad it is finally over.  I am satisfied with it for the most part.  The things I am not too happy about are the background and the perch feature.  I spent way too much time on the background experimenting around and it came out kind of plain and unimaginative anyway.  I couldn't quite get the coloring and texture of the perch feature the way I wanted to.  I didn't realize that getting wood to look real was so difficult.  The perch didn't really look good against the background either.  Oh well!  The bird came out well and that's the important thing anyway.  Unlike a lot of birdwatchers, I have a great affection for America's common native birds.  I like seeing the rare and hard to find species like anyone else, but the common neighborhood birds are part of a person's home environment, a very happy part in my view.  The Robin is as American as they come.  It can be found in every state except Hawaii as far as I know.  I greatly appreciate seeing and hearing this lovely bird.  It was a great pleasure drawing it as difficult as it was.

 It has been quite an experience trying to teach myself how to do freehand digital drawing.  There is a lot of trial and error involved to put it mildly.  It is very different from conventional drawing and painting.  It is a lot like sculpture actually.  On this project, I learned a couple of things.  First of all, I have a better grasp on using the paint tool for detail work and then using the pencil tool for smoothing and blending.  It's like using a saw or something to cut out a rough shape and then using sandpaper to smooth and blend the rough edges and surfaces.  I have also learned how to gain better control of the paint tool.  By zooming in on the subject matter, it decreases the number of pixels, which makes it easier to draw straight lines.  I did the word Connecticut by using this technique. 

The next state on the list will be Delaware.  The state bird of Delaware is a domestic poultry species called the Blue Hen Chicken.  It is called this even though there are roosters in this species of course.  This will be interesting I am sure.  The closest thing I have ever seen to a Blue Hen Chicken was being chased by Wile E. Coyote.