This is a digital painting done for my friend Dan for his apartment, which is done up in a pirate theme. I took a photo of him as well as our parrot, Tosh and put them together in the scene since Tosh has a tendency to bite Dan for some reason. The idea was to make it look like a cheesey Olan-Mills style painting so I made sure I was able to get this type of look from Dan as if he’s looking off in to the distance with wonder and amazement. The look he absolutely didn’t want was the one I went with, for good reason. For Tosh I held him on one hand and made aggressive advancements toward him with my other hand to make him lunge forward, with his bill open, thus giving him the same look when put in to the scene on Dan’s shoulder.

The project took a total of between 25-30 hours. I’ll attempt this technique again and will create a tutorial for it when I do since I created it before i had my blog up.