In a Wall Street Journal interview, Sibley said, "I wanted to paint what you would see through binoculars from 100 feet away, where the details blur together."
Even though he consults all sorts of reference images as he constructs each image, most of his illustrations are based closely on the postures and color impressions he notates in his field sketches.
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Read the online article: "Bird-World Star David Allen Sibley Releases New Guide"
Order the book: The Sibley Guide to Birds, Second Edition
2 comments:
Sibley is one of the people interviewed in the documentary "Ghost Bird," which is about the siting of the presumed-extinct Ivory-Billed Woodpecke a few years ago in Arkansas. The documentary is a little over an hour long, and Sibley is in it a few times.
He's even shown painting briefly in the trailer:
http://ghostbirdmovie.com/previews.html
Another reason why an artist's illustration is superior to a photograph for field guide purposes: the artist can create an idealized/generalized species portrait, in which all field marks are clearly visible without any of the idiosyncrasies that a particular bird may show in a photo. Every bird is an individual with it's own peculiarities, and that individual variation can be misleading when trying to identify other members of the species. That's part of why the top photographic guides to birds use digitally manipulated images, to achieve that general look of a species.
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