The Art of Bird Illustration

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AI generated illustrations of birds created with illustrations from the BHL Flickr using machine learning with a StyleGAN. The 18th century illustration of a black and white mottled bird on tulip stem with daffodils and butterflies. This contrasts with the line drawings of birds in Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds, Volume 1 (Land Birds) 1797 many of which were based on fresh specimens which had not shrunk.

He is best known for his main work ‘The Birds of America’, a collection of 435 hand-shaded drawings of American birds now available in print.Although I drew this purely to please myself I will be releasing prints of this very soon for anyone else who loves that song or eagles in general. The first network produces the fake images and the second will look at those images and try to determine whether it thinks they are “real” images or “fake. StyleGAN has been updated a few times and in 2020 StyleGAN2-ADA was released, which now allows us to train a network on very few images, actually as few as 500–1000 as opposed to 10,000s just a couple of years ago, and it will learn to produce good quality fakes in a very short period of time (a few hours of training). Originally painted in gouache and pen, this hand drawn illustration has been printed on lightly textured 300gsm watercolour paper, and signed in the bottom corner with permanent ink. These have to be passed and then the final illustrations are produced, more or less as in the draft.

Here, he publishes videos of his Machine Learning courses which he runs for people who want to use ML for creative purposes. the printing is colorful and clear and i have thoroughly enjoyed looking through it, both carefully and only perusing. A hack day involves spending a day working on projects which generally revolve around a particular theme and which ideally we can do in one day. I haven't been able to post much for the last few months as most things aren't due to be published until later THIS year!A set of 4 bird card designs, reproduced from my original pen and watercolour illustrations, printed on quality 350gsm matt card with white envelopes and beautifully presented in a little box for safe keeping. This is much easier than drawing birds in the field because holding binoculars and drawing is difficult! Eurasian wren (Nannus troglodytes) - Goldcrest (Regulus regulus) illustrated by the von Wright brothers.

The Observers Book of British Birds 1937 had colour illustrations on alternate spreads and included information now associated with a handbook. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Some of the illustrations in these books were inaccurate but then came Lars Jonsson’s Birds of Europe with North Africa and the Middle East and the 2nd edition of the Collins Bird Guide with illustrations by Killian Mullarney and Dan Zetterstrom. I have to obviously shout out to Derrick Schultz for his Colab notebooks and tutorials which also helped lower the barrier.Almost as a reaction to painting large clear portraits of birds with minimal background for book plates, Alan’s paintings are often of scenes with the focal point bird very small in the painting.