Hoatzin pencil sketch/study. A Hoatzin is a type of cuckoo! A very pretty one at that. It’s the punk bird of the cuckoo world.
It’s amazing how much more fun drawing can be on different types of paper. This is on a lightweight watercolor paper.
Before I switched to a Mac, there was a small, lightweight, little-known app called OpenCanvas that was my digital paint program of choice. As OpenCanvas is not Mac supported, my Mac forced me to learn Photoshop. I’m glad it did, as I grew to really love working with Photoshop. But, I always wondered about OpenCanvas. I remembered the program had a tactile quality to it that Photoshop never quite matched – Photoshop was developed as a photo manipulator that artists used to paint digitally, whereas OpenCanvas was developed from the start as a sketching and painting tool. It was coded specifically to utilize pressure-sensitive tablets.
The result is that OpenCanvas feels much more like drawing than Photoshop does, at least without custom brushes (the great thing about Photoshop is that you can customize it to perform the way you want).
After building my computer, though, I finally have the option of using OpenCanvas once again. So I headed over to Portalgraphics.net and downloaded a free trial of OpenCanvas 4.5+, as well as the first version, OpenCanvas 1.1, which is the only freeware version (so you can still download it here) to play around with.
The program actually didn’t feel as comfortable as I remembered in either version (the version I actually used years ago was oC 2.x). I suppose I’ve just grown too used to Photoshop! But here’s a sketch from 4.5+:
I do like these plants very much….
I did some ink drawings to try out my new Staedler pen. Over Christmas, I received this wonderful reference book of all kinds of different birds from around the world. I went through and chose the weirdest ones that I knew would be fun to draw, so these are all referenced from that wonderful book.
Tawny Frogmouth Adult
Tawny Frogmouth Chick
I can’t believe these are real animals
Hawk-Headed Parrot
Hoatzin
(top started out as the chick, but then turned into an imaginative drawing)
The Staedler pen is nice. I like it much more than the old Koh-I-Noor pen I used to have in high school. I think my bad experience with that pen (writes a nice line – for five minutes, then you have to clean it again) is part of what made me not like doing micron drawings. They are fun, but since buying the Staedler I’ve been using my quill pen more (see post below).
