55 of 365 is a hummingbird flying at night #inkscape

Night flight hummingbird – LeMasney Consulting

Happy valentine’s day to those of you who celebrate. Today’s sketch is a hummingbird caught out at night. Something about it appealed to me, something touching or romantic. I’m not sure.

Anyway, I got an image of a hummingbird in silhouette, a CC licensed image from Rick Buch on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickbuch/1332747859/ . I thought it was CC licensed because I used the Behold Search Engine and forgot that unless you specifically ask for images that are free to use and modify that by default you might as well be searching Flickr itself, which is not useful if you’re looking for CC images. I should have used one of the other 12 engines for finding great free images that use the CC license engine. Apologies and Kudos to Mr. Buch for a great shot.

I bitmap traced it in Inkscape, then, I added a circle with the ellipse tool and put some blur on it to give a bokeh effect. I applied the colors I wanted, including a slight gradient on the hummingbird from a black center to a very dark blue at the edge. The result is an easily reproduced night effect for almost any simple silhouette photo.