Locus

I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study

after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines

et voila

GIVE IT UP FOR BIRD NUMBUH 5, THE CANADIAN GOOSE, Branta canadensis!!!!

bird 5/14, Bluejay, Cyanocitta cristata

birds 6 and 7: American Goldfinch, Spinus tristis, male and female

BIRD NUMBER 8, (yellow shafted) NORTHERN FLICKERRRRR, Colaptes auratus

genuinely made me start questioning my sanity around day 3, it's half the size the of the goose, WHY did it take me 4 days to finish??

Bird number 9: Red-tailed hawk, Buteo jamaicensis

my chains are broken i am FREE. although i did have a great deal of fun with this, the barring on the wings itself took me like four days and i am READY to move on

this was a week and a half of continuous work so please excuse me for getting a little emotional in the bg 🙏

BIRD NUMBER 10!!! The Male Mallard Duck, Anas platyrhynchos

the male and female ones are gonna be posted separately bc they're taking a lot longer lol but yea! super happy i was able to capture the iridescent green of the head, i found metallic green and blue paint at a craft store that really made his head POP. it looks better in person i promise

ALSO!! As this is the 10th one, BIG announcement. The end is in sight!!!!! I plan to finish within the next 3 weeks and there will be a small dedication ceremony/ unveiling happening at the library to commemorate its completion on the 16th of May. If you live in the Western New York region and want to check it out for yourself shoot me a dm!

aaaand another one bites the duck,

we're movin right along with bird numero 11!! The lady Mallard!! Anas platyrhyncos

power couple that they are, here's bird number 12 and 13,

the Northern Cardinals, Cardinalis cardinalis

and NOW that they are complete, ITS GO TIME, in the next five days (library's closed for mother's day 😭😭) i need to have the GBH fully rendered, the names of the birds vectored, weeded, masked, applied to the wall, and then painted, plus additional cattails throughout. I may be able to get away with just getting the GBH done in time for the unveiling and then just have the names and cattails added later, but i'm gonna really try to get it all done in time. BUT, i have a plan. Part of why i take so long on these is because i really am just figuring it out as I do it lmao. there have been many a time where i am sitting on top of the ladder googling "how to paint birds" but I think if i take the time tomorro to do all that figuring out how to approach it beforehand, this will go a lot faster. I may also recruit some of my artist friends to help with the placing of the names... hrmm we'll see.

Anyways, shout out to the librarian who tracked down exactly the thing i needed so i could figure out where to place the highlights in my birds eyes, ur the real mvp

Bird number 14 out of 14,

The Great blue heron, Ardea herodius

thank you to everyone who reached out or got excited about this project, it genuinely gave me the fuel i needed to keep going. In total, the 480+ total hrs it took me to cover this wall pales in comparison to how long its expected to spend on there, hopefully imparting a sense of beauty and love for the natural world to the next generation and here's hoping i'm only getting started with these.

At minimum about 4.5 thousand people liked this without reblogging it.

Soggy and upset about it.

Do not use Discord to host your files. Do not rely on Discord to preserve your text. DO NOT RELY ON DISCORD FOR ANY KIND OF PRESERVATION OR HOSTING!!

It CAN be lost, it WILL be lost! You must consider Discord as a part of the Core Internet, controlled by one company that hosts the servers.

I thought it was impressive at first that it replaced IRC, but now I am horrified. If the company behind Discord went under today, how many friends would you lose?

How many relationships? How much writing?

You may think this won't happen, but I remember when AIM went down and along with it, entire novels worth of interaction with my oldest friend.

IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU. IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN. NO COMPANY IS INFALLIBLE.

I think they've done tests on this by getting people to pilot novel bodies in VR. But you don't tend to notice it day to day until something weird happens like just now. I was reading a paper book and it had a line of text blacked out as if redacted. Instinctively I go to move my cursor over the black line to see if I can read any text if I highlight it.

Except it's a book and not my computer screen, so the cursor my brain thinks it's moving across my field of vision in front of me doesn't exist. At the same time, my right hand is making a bunch of small involuntary movements next to me. I didn't intend to move it and didn't even notice it was moving until I saw it with my eyes. What I intended to move was my Cursor, something that my brain had learned to understand that it has, and the way it moves this is by actuating the muscles in my right arm, an action that is entirely disconnected from any intent to move my arm, which is a different thing.

A lot of people (myself included) who are fluent in driving or biking will kind of perceive the car / bike as their own body. The physical human body plan doesn't have wheels or axles or handlebars or brakes, but many of us can make our brains do that.

And it doesn't erase the awareness of my actual body, either. It dims it, maybe, but both levels (?) of self-perception can definitely exist at the same time. "I" am both the metal contraption and my flesh-and-blood body. I accelerate, I scratch an itch, I turn to the left, I drink some water.

The brain does not treat the mouse and cursor as tools; it treats them as biological extensions of your own limb. The moment you grasp the tool, the brain rewrites its own map (the Homunculus) to include the machine.

This is why the "Eldritch" description is so accurate. We like to think of ourselves as fixed souls inside a human-shaped jar. We are not. We are fluid consciousness. We are a shapeshifting current that will happily pour itself into a book, a car, or a cursor.