Egrets and Regrets

I thought I might write a clever piece about lamenting loss and change and such, but then I realized I really don't have much that I regret this year. Honestly, I pulled the "regret" rhyme out of the air so it could go with the Egret image I made last week.

It's a weirdly blissful feeling to know with deep certainty that I can't actually articulate or remember many regrets off the top of my head. I think that might mean I was mentally prepared to let go of a lot of "strings" that tied me to a part of my life that wasn't relevant to me anymore. It's actually quite heartening to realize the stresses of big change have been mostly manageable--stressful to be sure, but not anything that would cause me to feel regret about the choice to take them on.

Enough about regrets. Let's get to the Egret.

This piece was requested by a patron who came by my booth over the summer. There are all kinds of birds that look alike but have subtle differences--Egrets, Cranes, Herons, etc. But Egrets seem to be the species that is the most common here in Humboldt Bay, Arcata Marsh, and the Redwood Coast. This piece was long overdue--I still have a long list of birds I want to complete for folks here in the area.

As usual, this piece was made using Procreate, and I'm really happy with how it turned out. I skipped the crosshatching that I usually do and just leaned into the softness of what was happening. No hard horizontal waterline to suggest a horizon, no sky, not even a fully fleshed out pool of water. Just textures and grain. Which, ironically works out well for this image because the paper texture sort of "melds" with the Glaze effect I put on it to help make it harder for AI to use it for machine learning. Not that the precaution can't be circumvented, but it's easier to do that with an image that isn't as textured as what I like to do. Flatter images with more solid blocks of color seem to indicate the applied Glaze "film" a bit more.

But this piece has an inherent texture to it that feels more like watercolor than other pieces I've done, and I'm actually kind of excited about that. I think I'm going to lean into that a bit for a couple projects. Hm.

Here's the speedpaint: https://makertube.net/w/hwtJ9n97GmjpyfffH3BkMi