Mostly we photograph tawny frogmouths during the day, perched on a dead branch with their eyes closed, pretending to be a stick. We found this one when we were spotlighting at Basket Swamp, near Tenterfield in NSW in January 2016. (More of my Basket Swamp photos can be seen here.) It was stunning seeing the bird like this with its eyes wide open and I wanted to make this the major feature in my painting. The bird was quite small in the original photo and the lower half of its