$79.00
1 in stock (can be backordered)
Certificate of Authenticity Included
Every original artwork ships with a signed Certificate of Authenticity confirming title, medium, dimensions, and artist provenance. Created with archival-quality pigment ink on acid-free paper.
Two sketched cockatoos take flight from a rusted outback truck, hand-drawn in pencil with soft touches of colour.
A Date in the Bush follows two Sulphur-crested Cockatoos as they meet on the tray of an old truck, long left to rust somewhere out past the last fence line. One bird has its wings thrown wide, caught mid-stretch or mid-departure, while its mate settles in close, feathers loose and comfortable. Behind them the bush itself sits in black and white, gum trunks and scrub rendered in grey pencil, so the whole scene reads like a photograph pulled from a shed drawer, or a memory from another season. The truck itself carries the story: panels gone to rust, paint long faded, tyres sunk into the dirt, the kind of vehicle every rural property in Australia seems to keep somewhere out the back, quietly returning to the ground.
The artwork is built from fine pencil work, layered through digital collage. Every feather on the cockatoos is drawn by hand, crest to tail, before being brought into the piece and set against the machine. Running Duck Studio then lifts small sections of the composition out of black and white, letting patches of rust-orange and dull metal colour show through the truck’s bodywork. The effect sits the birds and the wreck in different registers of time, the cockatoos crisp and present, the truck fading, as if the scene itself is only half remembered.
There’s a quiet humour in it too. Cockatoos have a habit of turning up wherever people have stopped looking, claiming verandahs, wood piles, and abandoned machinery as their own. Here they’ve taken the truck as a perch and a stage, indifferent to its history, more interested in each other than the rust beneath their feet. The stretched wing catches the light through greys and shows off primaries that took hours of pencil work to get right, feather by feather, without tipping into stiffness. The bush around them stays soft and grey, a backdrop rather than a subject, so the eye keeps returning to the pair on the tray.
Running Duck Studio works from a love of Australian wildlife and the ordinary, overlooked corners of the bush: the tank stand, the fence post, the ute bogged past saving. A Date in the Bush is part of that ongoing series, pairing careful pencil drawing with digital colour to give old, forgotten machinery a second life as habitat. It’s available as an original digital collage, ready to bring a slice of the Australian bush, rust, feathers and all, into a home or studio.
A DATE IN THE BUSH
