Devastation

It’s cold and rainy today which caused me to wake up in a rather darkish mood, so I decided to create something rather darkish. Here we see a beautiful and now believed to be extinct Glaucous Macaw devastated by deforestation which is the main cause of its extinction. The illegal pet trade didn’t help either, of course, though I can’t find any mention of there being Glaucous Macaws in captivity either during my research for this piece. I did find that about 80,000 acres of rainforest is destroyed each day and another 80,000 acres are significantly degraded each day. It’s also estimated that we irrevocably lose 135 plant, animal, and insect species each and every day with the loss of our rainforests. This has to stop. In regard to the artwork, I wanted it to be almost completely devoid of life except for that poor, lonely macaw. (That empty gray sky looks so similar to what’s outside my window right now.) There’s a just a little bit of green plant life, a little bit of hope, in the lower left corner of the scene.

Here are some websites that you may find of interest related to this artwork and its theme: Rainforest Alliance, Rainforest Action Network, Rainforest Site, Blue Macaws.

This scene was rendered with depth of field in Superfly. For lighting I used a cloudy sky dome and, I think, some default lighting because it just seemed to fit my idea rather than anything fancy. It’s almost a raw render with very little postwork. I adjusted the colors and contrast with a Photoshop action and some adjustment layers. I then added a heavy vignette effect. I also decided to run it through ON1 Effects to create a depth cue effect along with the help of my handy dandy eraser brush. Finally, I added my signature and that was that.

Most of these items are available from the Renderosity Marketplace (unless otherwise noted):

• SBRM Parrots of the World Vol 3: Macaws of the World by Ken Gilliland