Birds with UAP [and Redactions]

After slipping between the clouds of coughed droplets for two and a half years I finally got hit by covid in August. You can read elsewhere about how much it sucks (it sucks), but it did give me an extended period of enforced convalescence during which my capacity for the complexity of drawing comics was... reduced, and so I worked on a series of drawings for my supporters for a while.

Over the last few years I've done a number of small projects for these folks, of a sort usually pretty far removed from comics — it’s helpful to play in other sandboxes sometimes, to give the comics muscles some time to relax now and then. A number of these projects have taken the form of collage, or drawing on photos of various sorts, notably obscuring heads in old photos with invented shapes. Using found imagery is something I did a lot of when I was younger, before comics took over my work life. And these various ways of working have sometimes overlapped, since. Anyway, I had an idea about something roughly along those lines again, but maybe drawing in landscape photos, something along the lines of the cover image of In Your Next Life You’ll Be Together With All of Your Friends. To find images to work with I went to a folder of pictures culled from a set of World Book encyclopedias from 1953 that had belonged to my mother when she was a child. I’d inherited them, but not having unlimited shelf space I just cut out the pictures.

Most of the landscapes I found there weren’t that promising (with one notable exception that I’m holding back for the moment), but the entry on birds peaked my interest immediately. There were six pages in the entry, each with a grid of four beautiful little color drawings of some bird species or other, in its habitat, doing its thing, drawn by someone named George Miksch Sutton. I cut these out and started drawing on them and was pleased with the results. Unfortunately the pages were double-sided, leaving me with a total of only twelve pieces. Which was not enough for all the supporters.

I looked Sutton up and found several other books of his drawings and observations of birds in various environments, dating from around the same time. I ordered one of these from Ebay, Portraits of Mexican Birds. When it arrived I found it was... much bigger than I'd imagined. The pages were roughly 11" x 14" — not the small jewel-like images in the World Book, but big full-sized showcase pieces, with no backgrounds. They had quite a different feel, and it took me a while to wrap my head around the larger, more spare compositions, but in the end I think I figured it out, and they make a nice companion set to the smaller pieces. And there are tiers of support, which ended up making the numbers work. There are 12 of the small pieces (13 if you count the one double-sided one I did) and 28 of the larger pieces, of which 20 went to the higher tier patrons. Here are a few of the larger pieces:

I'm hoping to make a zine of all the drawings together at some point. The fluorescent paint I used in many of them, however, is not simple to reproduce in print — even the (manipulated) digital version rendered here is a little dull in comparison with the actual pigment) so it may be a while before I make it happen. But in the words of one supporter, on instagram "Anders Nilsen's homespun Patreon goes HARD." They are weird little drawings. I'm glad that someone else likes them, too.

In the end I was left with several more drawings than I have supporters. These have now been listed in the shop, in case you’re interested (or just want to see a few more examples). Sign up here to get added to the list for the next project I do along these (or maybe some completely other) lines.