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I knew exactly what I wanted to do as soon as I saw this week’s Inktober52 prompt: birds. Flocks of starlings are absolutely fascinating to watch; undulating in the air like parts of a larger organism. I wanted to catch the essence of this amorphous phenomenon. I drew a silhouette of a starling, then used Adobe Fresco’s multi-color eye-dropper tool to pick up the bird image. I applied this single image to a hard round variable brush and adjusted the spacing, scatter, and stylus pressure profile so I had a little variation in bird size and spacing, but not too much (the flock is usually not spread over miles, so I didn’t need extreme perspective tricks). I then used my Apple Pencil to draw strokes of flying birds. The background is a photo of this morning’s sunrise.

This week’s Inktober52 prompt is “Travel”. In Adobe Fresco I laid out the letters individually, then applied a photo from six different trips to each letter layer to mask. To add the glass bubble effect, I converted the photos to pixel so I could add shadow and highlight within the letter mask. (If you don’t convert, Fresco makes a separate layer that floats above the mask.) The shadow I made from duplicate letters offset below the other layer letter.

Last week’s prompt was “xray”. So many possibilities. I admit I waited a week to see this week’s prompt to narrow the field: “soar”. Hm. The consensus in the household was that combining the two necessitates a drawing of an xray of a bird. My eldest, when asked to name a bird, said albatross. So here is my rendition of a radiograph of an albatross! I used a picture of an albatross skeleton as a guide, and used pixel brushes with white to sketch the xray. It helps to think of drawing the shadows, but with light, to get an xray effect (or thinking where the bone would be thickest). Dropping in a black background completes the illusion.