Bird Art From Urban Decay

Here is another collection of my wildlife artwork that I make from macro photographs of urban decay. In this case it's birds only!

It always starts with searching the corners of our urban world for weathered surfaces. There are always some around, but for my purposes I need them to be fairly flat so I can get everything in focus. This means that all the lovely rusty old curved objects with deep layers of flaky paintwork are just enjoyed in-situ. At the time of taking the photograph I do not usually have a final image in mind, I am just taking what feels like a good/interesting composition.

Once back home I stare at the images until a natural scene with wildlife forms in my imagination. Photoshop is the main tool I use to do the rest.

"Duck Lake" - this is a good example of how the natural shapes and patterns are all there in the weathered surface but it usually takes the addition of wildlife to make it jump out. Weathering is a natural process so what it leaves behind reflects the natural world. In this case the simple addition of a duck and its reflection, which take up less than 1% of the image, turns all the paintwork flaking away from that rusty metal into a peaceful pond with its shoreline and blue sky.

"Shorebird Rust" - This one (I am fairly sure) was the first of this style of artwork that I made over ten years ago now. My immediate and only aim at the time was to use the very minimal introduction of an animal to create the feeling of a natural habitat. And I was very pleased with the result. The textures fit a low-tide coastline and the colour fits a sunset. Up until the point that I made this I was only imagining it to myself.

"Cormorant Shore" - cormorants are a great shape for this kind of artwork: elegant and with a distinctive upper half that allows the lower half to be merged into the background without losing sense of what it is. I love how the flaked off white parts are where the energy of the surf's movement lies.

"Woodpecker Woods" - the background photo here is dribbled paint on the back of a road-sign over one of Bangkok's main arteries with weathering having worn parts of it away. It makes for a good group of trees reaching up for the light somewhere above the city smog.

"Nuthatch" - as a teenager, the nuthatch was one of my favourite birds. Common enough to hope that I might get a sighting but rare enough to be special when I did. This one is blended into a mess of old sticky advertisement labels on the glass of a bus-stop.

"Snowy Fence Robin" - some kind of white paste had been dribbled and splattered onto a sheet of glass and left to dry and then weather. When I took the photo I didn't think it would come to anything but turning it sideways made a nice fence for a robin to perch on.

"Winter Wren" - more sloppy workmanship of white paint liberally splattered over some outdoor tiles where it clearly wasn't meant to be. With that one lazy stripe, I imagine from a carelessly placed paint roller, as an ideal perch for this guy. I wrote these two brief lines to go with it:

Tiny, tiny, tiny bird,
Hard to see, easily heard.