Challenge
Covid lockdown left a lot of creative people looking for structure. I’d developed a serious interest in birding, and wanted to build a daily illustration practice around it. I knew I needed constraints to make good work. The question was how to make thirty-one birds feel like a cohesive body of work rather than a month of disconnected sketches.
Approach
Inspired by modernist illustrators like Charley Harper, I developed a flat, geometric style that abstracted each bird into simple, rounded shapes with bold, recognizable colors. I kept each piece to a limited palette to force decisions rather than options. I added minimal grain shading as the only texture. And I held one rule throughout: I only illustrated birds I had actually seen, whether regulars in Southern California, native Kentucky species, or birds encountered while traveling.
