In the far distant past of July 2024, at a time when I was using a compact camera for such things, I took some photos of a kookaburra I came across. The area was firmly in shade and, combined with the optical properties of a compact camera operating at its maximum telephoto range, the pictures are all a bit rubbish. Generally the noise of compact-sourced photos becomes apparent when zooming in, but a few of those photos are so affected that they still look bad when scaled down significantly, enough to be readily apparent to me even when that camera was all I knew and I wasn’t as sensitive to such noise as I am now.

Which, fine, whatever. But there was this one photo where the kookaburra is looking to the side, and it comes across as a rather cheeky glance. Enough so that my sister really liked the photo. Which was distressing to me because it is a cute shot, but it’s also such a bad photo! You couldn’t reasonably hang or display it anywhere at pretty much any size.

But some time last month, I was struck with this genius idea – what if I just drew the bird, appropriating its expressiveness but making it not-awful in the process? So that’s how the image above came to be. I don’t think I quite managed to reproduce “the look”, but it certainly stands out in its visual clarity.