A Daily Cloud is an ongoing art project by illustrator Chris Judge, who combines sketches and photos in his work.
Judge told PetPixel that the project, which has 350,000 followers on Instagram, came about because he was bored during lockdown.
Judge says, “I spent a lot of time in the garden with my two young daughters, making it a peaceful place for us to hang out.”
“My 8-year-old daughter had taken my old Canon G9 II and was taking hundreds of beautiful pictures of the flowers in bloom, bugs, birds, and other things in the garden.”
The lockdowns forced photographers to look up, where life was still going on as usual. One day, Judge saw “some beautiful pink clouds that looked like a monkey and a bear.”
“I took pictures of them and, on a whim, drew very simple pencil lines on them and put them on Twitter and Instagram,” he says.
“People loved them and 70,000 people liked them, so I decided to make one every day.”
Creativity
The pictures that came out are a fun, creative take on everyday things that most people wouldn’t notice.
Judge, who lives in Ireland and writes picture books for kids, says that he will go outside on a cloudy day and take lots of photos with his iPhone or Canon M6 Mark II.
“I have a folder with about 30,000 photos of clouds, so I usually have a few to choose from when I want to draw,” he says.
“I also get a lot of messages and photos of clouds from all over the world on Twitter and Instagram, which I love.”
Judge’s new daily routine is to pick a photo he took or that someone sent him and import it into Procreate, an app for editing graphics.
Judge says about his work, “I try to draw as few lines as possible and let the shape of the cloud do the heavy lifting.”
The popular Daily Cloud project is a great example of how photographers can build on their art in different ways.