At the time I made this pattern I had a huge pigeon problem on my balcony, a family of pigeons decided that our balcony was the perfect place to nest on, and when pigeons decide to nest, it’s reaaaally hard to make them leave.
The bird couple built their nest pretty fast and made a huge mess with their twigs & poop everywhere. If we removed their nest they would just built a new one in a few days, we tried everything to make them leave, making a Papier-mâché crow and a printed out a owl taped on the window to scared them away, we put chicken wire & fishing line all over the balcony to make it hard for them to fly to their nest. But nothing worked.
And that’s where the inspiration for my pattern came, I would just look out through the window and see these birds looking back at me with their stupid eyes, and it felt like they were saying “this balcony is ours now”.
The drawing process was a lot of fun, I drew the birds by hand and tried to have fun with it, I wanted it to be a pattern where you discovered new things by looking long enough, so I needed a lot of different birds. I then scanned the drawing and did the last of the work digitally, the editing and coloring and lastly making it a repeated pattern design.