Remember, pollinators can’t swim! Good water sources are often shallow and/or include varying sizes of rocks, corks, or pebbles so that the insects may stand where it’s dry and drink from the source. Adding a bird bath (the bird’s will share!).Placing a container of water out in the open*.Some ways to create a clean water source for pollinators are: Finally, after many hours of work, it felt great to submit the final image ready to show and print. After some last-minute tweaks and adjustments, the last step involved laying out the title, text boxes and other graphical elements (frames, pointers, etc.). Subsequently, it was time to focus on the foreground elements, namely the plants, blooms and pollinators, which were rendered in full detail and working alongside visual references the whole time, in order to depict them as accurately as possible.

After figuring out the composition, I focused on developing the landscape scene, working in layers (starting from the background and moving forward) and paying a strong attention to the lighting, the atmosphere and the mood. In complex pieces like this, involving landscape scenes combined with multiple text and graphical elements, composition is key to achieve an harmonious and well-balanced layout of all elements, so I like to tackle this aspect first of all, planning where to place my focal points in the image to draw the viewer’s attention properly. Luckily, I was assisted throughout by the great team at Pollinator Partnership, which provided key information on the fauna and flora to depict and their most relevant biological aspects (geographical and seasonal ranges, ecological relationships, conservation status or impact on agricultural activity, to name some).īoth the sketch and the final art for the 2021 Pollinators Poster were created digitally, using Adobe Photoshop.

This was made possible by a thorough research and documentation phase, which in fact supported the whole creation process. One of the trickier parts of the process involved creating an accurate mental image of how agricultural landscapes in the US look like. Once the concept and sketch were approved, it was time to get into details. This setting would be in turn ideal to show how pollinators contribute to support agricultural ecosystems and what can we do in turn to help them thrive and complete the virtuous cycle. After checking the theme for this year’s poster, I immediately envisioned the following concept: a familiar agricultural landscape, seemingly quiet on the surface, but teeming with life, activity and diversity when zooming in on the pollinators.

Colony survival game getting flax seeds