Study of a Bird

Here is my first official blog post dealing with my artwork! So, earlier this week I was surfing my favorite artist's community site, DeviantART and happened upon this gem: Steinadler

I adore this photo! Kudos to the photographer; it looks amazing. (I browsed his gallery and, believe me, this isn't even his best photograph. They're all very beautiful.) Still, something about this photo begged me to sketch it, and who was I to argue? So, off I went with sketchpad in hand and this is what I have to show for a few days work.

In all honesty, I'm proud of it. For the work I put into it, (which isn't as much as I probably should have) it turned out okay. But to get into a in-depth critique: the head is the part that I spent the most time on and that's pretty obvious. Why? Because it has the most dramatic use of shading and texture. I wanted the focus to be on the eyes and that is where they're drawn to first.

Getting to the rest of the sketch though. The wings are poorly done. I took a shortcut and instead of building up the shading by adding more the the small lines I had been using, I just scribbled a little to get the basic sense of darkness and the difference in feather color. While the feathers are defined, they're not very accurate in their placement. Again, I cut corners.

The chest also isn't shaded properly. In fact, it isn't at all. I but the base texture down and said, "for a study, I get how to do it in the future so this is good enough." For the purpose of the sketch, shading in the rest of the chest wasn't necessary.

Conclusion? I'm very satisfied with what I learned while I was working on this bird. I got a good sense of the basic anatomy and how the feathers are placed. And it was fun, which is the most important part!