"Murdered by Crows" I also sometimes call it "Wildlife Crime".
This was one of the first times I created more of a story in my urban decay wildlife art. The basic idea is a play on the collective pronoun for these birds: a murder of crows. Given the corvids' interest and ability to steal it starts here with petty theft but then develops into something far more sinister. The victim in this case being a bird-watcher.
This is a digital work made from photographs with the help of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Here are more details about the creation process.
My wildlife art always starts with one or more macro photographs of weathered urban surfaces that can be found in any of our towns and cities. Often it is just a single background image but in this case I blended three photos in Photoshop to produce a background with more depth. Each of them could be used on its own but combining them is quite an enjoyable part of the process that often creates unexpectedly interesting results.
The background I used created by blending three urban decay photographs.
Next come the silhouettes of the wildlife and any other objects I use. I draw these in Illustrator and have built up a collection that I can re-use or adapt for different works. The screenshot below shows the various crows I have plus a few other things. I copy and paste these individually into Photoshop to use as layer masks.
Part of my collection of silhouettes made in Adobe Illustrator with their sharp, clean edges.
The "fill" for the layer masks always comes from somewhere around the background so that the textures and any patterning within the wildlife matches the rest of the scene. In this case I used the blue area in the bottom right corner as the fill, adjusting the darkness and saturation where necessary plus rotating or flipping it to fit the shape of the bird better.
Blending the wildlife into the background is a vital part of the process to help it look believable. There are several tricks I use here. One is simply positioning. For example, placing a crow with its feet on a dark part of the background so they are well hidden immediately makes the bird look more a part of the scene rather than separate from it.
Secondly, using the Layer Style Blending Options offers a subtle way of getting part of the background to show through the animal. Thus part of the background is infront of the bird and part behind making the crow really look like it is within the scene. For example, this could be getting the very dark parts to show through or maybe the colour red. This could also be done by painting on the layer mask but I find that way harder and slower to get good results.
Thirdly, I use "Select and Mask" to roughen the edge of the silhouettes so that they match the roughness of the edges in the background. Without doing this they are usually too sharp and stand out as being different to the rest of the scene.
Left - the red splash and dark grey of the background shows through the crow. Right - the roughened edge of a crow.
But all of this is of little use without care being taken with the overall composition. In this case it was complicated by the idea of wanting to tell a story. I tried to do so in two ways. All other things being equal our eye tends to follow the way we read so I put the beginning, where I hope people will look first, up at the top. This is re-inforced by this top part being the brightest area with highest contrast so the eye naturally starts there and the first crows looked at are the thieving ones carrying jewellry. Lower down the scene is more hidden and what is actually happening is less obvious. Going down from the top there are binoculars hanging there and a bird with a key in its beak. Then the bird pulling on a boot-lace and the human hand in distress. This hand is also disguised by being mirrored by the wing of a partially hidden crow.
A rough idea of how I think the viewer's eye wanders.
I love crows and if there's a reason behind this image beyond the "murder of crows" joke then I'd say it's a comment on our often quite twisted relationship with nature and animals. I wouldn't blame them if they started picking on us.
