It started with a tattoo design…

My husband has some deep-set inclination to get a tattoo and is often suggesting we stop in a shop and get one—though, after almost 40 years of existence, neither of us have yet to get any ink. In order to prevent an impulsive, last-minute decision, I offered to create a tattoo design that he could bring to an artist to have inscribed on his body.

He suggested I try designing some sort of geometric rendition of a cardinal—a homage to the state bird of both Kentucky, where he’s from, and Illinois, where we live—so I began some research on low poly style artwork.

Just as I approached the brink of this rabbit hole, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and I suddenly had nothing but time to go full-bore creating low poly birds.

I ended up creating twelve bird illustrations, along with individual posters for each, and a poster design featuring all twelve in full-color and wire-frame versions.

The twelve birds I featured are:

• Canada Goose

• Common Barn Owl

• Great Blue Heron

• Northern Cardinal

• Blue Jay

• Piping Plover

• Eastern Meadowlark

• Herring Gull (Seagull)

• American Robin

• Purple Finch

• Rock Dove (Pigeon)

• Common Raven

Low poly is a style that hearkens back to the early days of 3-D graphics and animation, when in order to economize processing and rendering times during development, complex figures would be displayed in low-resolution polygons. A few years ago, low poly saw a renaissance as a retro-modern design trend in artwork and advertising.

The posters

With visions of pandemic side-hustles dancing in my head, I had been toying with the idea of either posting them for download/purchase on Creative Market or Deeezy for people to use in their own projects, or offering prints for sale on this website.

I began by making a series of 20” x 28” posters, one for each bird. Each features the bird, along with its latin name, in front of what I ended up calling ‘Elemental Spheres.’ (More on that later…)

Put a bird on it…

With the possibility of selling my avian friends as graphic stock, I put together these mockups of the graphics in use on pins, greeting cards, wine bottles, posters, and even… tattoos!

While they are a versatile menagerie, I haven’t yet pulled the trigger on making them available. What do you think? Would you purchase them to use on your own projects? Would you hang any of the poster designs in your home or office? Would you have them inked permanently onto your flesh? Or maybe a wall calendar is more your speed…

I’d love to hear what you think - shoot me any feedback on my contact page.

Elemental Spheres of the Anthropocene

What started as an afterthought—making a separate poster of all of the spheres featured in the individual bird posters—quickly became my favorite aspect of the project. Each sphere contains a low poly texture overlaid upon another texture taken from nature. The twelve Elemental Spheres of the Anthropocene are: Night Smog, Run-off, Ash Dune, Acid Snow, Remaining Beach, Windshield Frost, Artificial Flavor, Concrete, Resistant Grass, Low Red Moon, Still Egg, and Lumber. I think of this poster as a kind of mysterious graphic poem, presenting itself with an assumed context that has since been lost.

The Anthropocene is a proposed designation of our current geological epoch. It is characterized by the myriad and destructive effects the activities of homo sapiens have had upon the planet Earth.