I made two more bird collages this weekend and am really enjoying working with the Audubon prints from an old book and giving them new life. Many of Audubon's bird illustrations seem to have exaggerated poses or odd turns of the bird's body – like the bottom bird of this pair of catbirds – so I just used the one catbird in my composition. I altered the color to make the bird slate gray like it is in real life, added text about the catbird's habits, an illustration on the mechanics of flight, and more leaves and berries.
In the piece with the white-crowned sparrows, I added some very subtle Victorian filagree to the background on the left. I showed the first of the mise-en-scène series to a friend this weekend and she remarked that the background had an eggshell feel, so I've used that same technique as part of the manipulation of the art in these two.
