My mom was the inspiration of this piece. She loves hummingbirds. I also took it as a great opportunity to stretch my own wings a bit (as it were). All of the scratchboard pieces I’d seen had been pretty static, and I was thinking that I could exploit the illustrative techniques I’d gained over the years to try to put some action into this medium.

Every scratchboard hummingbird I had seen had the bird’s wings frozen, as if by a high speed camera. Watching hummingbirds every year in my backyard, I know that that’s not how they look in real time. So I put in some wing motion blur. This techinque drew it share of raves from the scratchboard community.

Originally, the hummingbird was going to be approaching a flower (it was sketched out on the board), but that simply wasn’t satisfying me. When I realized that mother’s day was coming up, and that this was inspired by my mother, I opted instead to put in the hungry chicks. They definitely work much better than the flower would have.