Wildlife Sketching

Whatever the subject—house, boat, landscape, animal, or bird—I want an artistically pleasing drawing first; but I also want a reasonable degree of faithfulness to the geometry of the subject.

Do the same: make your quick action sketches from direct observation. Then go to detailed reference works to see just what outline features you need to emphasize (tail, crest, beak). Finally, tone your sketch to indicate the lights and darks, and add the dark patterns where they belong.

Parts of a bird’s leg. There is a definite angle unless the bird has its leg stretched.

If you intend to develop your bird sketching abilities beyond casual diversion, you should eventually do a little research on the skeleton and major muscles of birds, how their feathers lie, and how their wings work.

Note that to minimize the neck, I slightly overlapped the head and body circles.

A crude bird sketch (no particular bird) developed from the arrangement of balls in .

A larger head circle is used to prepare a sketch of a chickadee.

The chickadee shape is drawn using the circles simply as guides, not as rigid outlines.

For an excellent visual explanation of all perspective drawing principles, see Ernest Norling’s book, Perspective Drawing. It is number 29 in the famous Walter Foster art books series. Any art supply store that carries Walter Foster books can get it for you.

To estimate two-point perspective, all you have to remember is that one of the vanishing points is close to the subject and the other is farther away on the other side.

In this illustration the tops of the telephone poles are at his eye level, and since the horizon is also at his eye level, the tops of the poles appear to touch the horizon (). In this case everything is below the horizon and the horizon itself is moved upward in the frame.

The big difference this time is that the horizon would cross the telephone poles near the bottoms.