It should come as no surprise to anyone who’s familiar with me or my stuff that I like birds. I had a few local, small-scale farmer’s markets coming up and I wanted to have something more “normal” at my booth. I had been bouncing the idea of a calendar around for a while, and decided that this was finally the year I’d actually do it.

A big motivation for me doing this project was the fact I already had most of the artwork just lying around. It turns out I just draw birds every now and again, so most of them just needed a little bit of formatting work and they were good to go. In particular, I tried to assign the existing images as best I could, but some of them needed to be changed to fit the month better. For example, this bluebird ended up being assigned to November but had much more of an autumn aesthetic, so I changed the colors around a little bit so it fit better.

I also changed the crow to have snow on it, since he was going to be my December bird. I also needed to add more background, since he was a portrait image, and the calendar wanted landscape images. I had to do similar background expansions for the African Grey and Blue Jay.

For the Robin I also cheated a little bit; the robin painting was actually a griffin, so I only included the bird parts in the calendar. I also smoothed out his feathers to look more feathery and less furry.

For the actual design of the not-artwork part of the calendar, I decided to incorporate a bunch of feather motifs along with some pretty blue hues to give the whole thing a delicate feeling.

This was a really quick project that I’m pretty proud of. Over Christmas I sent a bunch out to friends and family since a calendar is easier to gift then a really specific set of video game playing cards or something. I think I might do another one in the future, potentially this year if time permits!