Photography and painting

At a farm stand I found a small ornamental gourd.  It had beautiful colors of green, orange, and yellow.  Other than the fact that it was the wrong color, it looked like a claw foot found often on US Colonial furniture.  So I bought it.  After about a week of staring at it I decided that I had to turn it into a raptor's talons holding a sphere. Given the color of the gourd, it had to be a dragon.  A dragon holding a pearl is a classic motif in Chinese art.

This is a typical Photoshop composite.  The pearl is a circle that is shaded by a circular gradient. The talons were drawn with the pen tool and shaded by hand.  Turning gentle ridges on the side of the gourd into round claws with talons required a lot of careful dodging and burning. Elements that were close to each other had to have appropriate shadows.  The pearl is iridescent, so it had to show some color bleed from the yellow claws.

I have always been fascinated by lichens that grow on trees. Often when near the seashore I get in close with a macro lens and see what I can find.  Just because plants take days to move much doesn't mean that there is no conflict. Lichens are always battling the plant they are colonizing, and also each other.

This was taken in natural light with a simple mirrorless crop-sensor camera.

Even on a gray day in midwinter there is a lot of color to be found at small scale.  Here we see at least four varieties of scavenger plants feeding on a dead branch of a cherry tree.