A digital painting of a barn owl perched on a post in a field, drawn entirely using digital airbrush. This was drawn for my mum's birthday, finished with two days to spare!

Drawn using the same method as my juvenile kingfisher, I worked with AutoDesk SketchBook Pro on a Tablet PC (drawing directly on the screen) using the airbrush and the eraser tools only. As always, I worked from a photo reference but drew and coloured 'by eye'. This piece took at least 24 hours, possibly as much as 30 or 35 hours as I completely lost track of how long I'd spent.

You possibly saw the work in progress back in April [link] where I had lost all hope that I'd spent at least 15 hours on the piece and hadn't got further than adding detail to the face. I actually started this in late March, continued into April, lost the will to continue for two months, then finished it in two sittings in late June. Phew!

In hindsight, I greatly underestimated how much detail work there was in this. I spent approximately 15 hours on detail, mostly due to how much of the reference image/texture is actually tiny black and white squares...

The reference image was a stock photograph from deviantART, taken by the extremely talented `KevLewis [link]

Update 2009-06-25: Spent an additional hour and a half improving the left eye, the face and the shadows/definition around the edge of the wing. I can still see things 'wrong' with it, but I think I'm going to considered it 'abandoned' now!

Update 2009-07-05: OK it wasn't completely abandoned! I just spent another hour improving the shape of the wing feathers and darkening the background to make the owl stand out more and make it closer to the colours in the reference image. This is really really abandoned now, honest! I hope you think this is an improvement and hasn't made it worse...