How To Draw A Bird

Day 198: A month ago, I was telling an artistic friend that I couldn't draw a cardboard box well enough to make it recognizable, and it was true. She encouraged me to keep trying, pointed me toward another artist whose explanation of perspective was very helpful (at least it taught me to draw the cardboard box so that it didn't look like someone had sat rather heavily on it) and, bolstered by that small success, I invested in a couple of cheap sketchbooks. For the last week or so, I've been drawing something every day. Birds have been a recurring theme, although they haven't been my only subjects. Another friend suggested that I buy John Muir Laws' "Guide to Drawing Birds." I did, and here you see the results of the first lesson. Laws' system was for a pencil sketch, but once I had inked in my "wobbler," I decided he needed some colour. Since I hadn't illustrated facial markings, I turned him into a Yellow Warbler. The pencil and ink drawings at the top of this image show the various stages of my work, first creating a basic bird shape with a few lines, an oval and a circle, into which I "carved" the arcs of neck and throat. Then I added detail to the body, face, wing and tail to show the major feather groups, following that with drawing individual feathers. In the penultimate phase, I applied ink with a fine-point Sharpie. Then, not having a "wobbler" to pose for me, I sat at the kitchen table with Roger Tory Peterson in hand as a guide to colour. For a first attempt at drawing a realistic bird, I don't think I did half bad.