I did an illustration of a man holding a parrot. I don’t know the man or the parrot but apparently they’re good buddies—or were at this moment anyway. I’ve never been to Reddit before but it’s top stories always show up on my favorite news aggregator, Popurls. I usually scan the headlines just out of curiosity, but most of the time it doesn’t look like anything too exciting.

Now this was a couple of weeks ago already so I forgot what the headline was, but it seemed captivating enough for me to want to check it out. Again, I forget the specifics but this person’s father was going through some rough patch and needed some cheering up. The submitter presented a picture of their father and his parrot, which was apparently the only time the bird had allowed someone to hold it, and asked for people to “Photoshop” the picture to help cheer up pops.

It was a pretty poor quality picture, I think it was taken from a phone, which meant that there really wasn’t too much magic that could be done in photoshop. Instead, I took it into illustrator and traced out a nice clean vector illustration.

It was a nice photo->vector learning experience for me and the the Reddit submitter seemed genuinely pleased. I think she(?) was thinking about turning it into a t-shirt.

Sorry about your dad’s awkward smile.