The Art of Bird Illustration

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Cambourne is a vibrant community and it is our intention to enable more residents to play an active role in the community, through participation in community events and activities, volunteering, attendance at Town Council meetings, ideas for community development, or simply taking advantage of our excellent community and sports facilities within the villages. This wasn’t ideal for the above reasons, but I decided to give it a go and see what the results would be like anyway. I also encourage you to have a look through the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s 250,000+ images on their Flickr. 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.

The 18th century illustration of a European green woodpecker on a branch with rose and forget me nots.Initially bird illustrators have to produce little sketches showing how they plan to fit birds on the page. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Alan won the British Birds magazine 'Bird Illustrator of the Year' award in 1982 and has been joint Art Consultant to that magazine since 1988. I’m looking forward to using this technology with more datasets and seeing what new and weird flora, fauna and other images I might be able to create! I’m pretty sure if you didn’t know this was generated by a Neural Network you would have no trouble believing it was a real bird illustration.

Due to time constraints, I did allow some illustrations with more than one bird in them and some with background features such as grass. Drawing exercise - freehand, quick, loose, no erasing - some turn out fine but others not so much, but that's OK. I watched Derrick’s tutorials on training a StyleGAN Neural Network and the things he was saying made a degree of sense to me, plus he had published a handy Google Colab notebook with step-by-step code, so I decided it was something I might be able to have a go at. John Gould’s illustrations of Darwin’s specimens from his voyage on The Beagle brought the birds to life but his illustrations in The Birds of Great Britain 1862, which were based on old specimens, were less good. And we use only the most premium quality, high-pigment inks — for rich, bold colours that'll be just as vibrant in 20 years as they are today.Eurasian wren (Nannus troglodytes) - Goldcrest (Regulus regulus) illustrated by the von Wright brothers. 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.

The theme this past hack day at Cogapp was “Museum APIs,” but the looser interpretation was that we were to use open data provided by museums in our projects. Using another of Derrick Schultz’s Google Colab notebooks, I generated a couple of videos of interpolations through my model. Summer nature vector graphic elements Set of nature vector design elements isolated on white background. I have to obviously shout out to Derrick Schultz for his Colab notebooks and tutorials which also helped lower the barrier.

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). The publisher John James Audubon's most popular creation was The Birds of America, which is considered the world's most costly printed book. I left the model training over the weekend and the fakes actually did start looking like they could be illustrations of birds in many cases!