The Challenge of a Challenge

by Kathy Garvey

The Pieces spent the month of February, when we weren't preoccupied with our show and sale, working on crows and other black birds. That's because our February blog challenge set up by member Carmen was to paint a black bird without using black.  It could be a raven, crow, anhinga, cormorant…you get the idea…any black bird. And we don't always paint, so I interpreted that as create because some of us collage and Photoshop and fiddle around with other media.

I gathered some crow images. Here's a few.  Click on any image to enlarge it.

I looked up the difference between crows and ravens. Here's a good link if you are curious: How to Tell a Crow from a Raven.

I sketched up a dozen ideas in my sketchbook.

I fell into playing with my photos in Photoshop, making sure not to use black for my crows.

Then I started to feel like maybe I should have painted, not Photoshopped. So I sketched some more and tried a watercolor of one of my thumbnail sketches. 

It was a childish idea that turned out to be a childish watercolor. But, it was fun to do, and I didn't use black!

But, then back to Photoshop for another round.

The challenge of a challenge is to finish it with something you are happy with, even if it took the whole darn month. On the last day for the blog challenge, I had to decide which one of these to post. It will post tomorrow morning with all of the others.

Hope you all enjoy our post tomorrow seeing everyone's crows! The challenge resulted in lots of crows! Something to crow about!