My sparrow.

I was amazed at how accurate my drawing turned out.  It was fun, but several times I felt like I was getting lost.  I tried to keep myself from viewing it as a bird and kept going back to just drawing the shapes.

It was both fun, with some difficult parts, especially when lots of lines and shapes came together.  The upside-down drawing definitely helped with abstracting the relationships between the shapes, rather than drawing from preconceived ideas of what the subject should look like.

Upside down drawing was fun. This was my first time drawing with a mechanical pencil. 

This was a fun exercise.  When I look at all the Song Sparrows we all drew, I enjoyed the fact that each has its own character and personality.

Like Dorothy below, the chest markings confused me, but they ended up giving the bird some depth. I also didn't trust the length of the tail or the shape of the eye, but those turned out about right too. I used negative space often to help place the line. This exercise enlightened me!

I found the chest pattern markings the hardest to focus on as without the dark and light contrast,I kept getting lost in the pattern. I do think this is a good exercise for proportion help.

Challenging but excellent exercise.  Not because of the upside down image, but most difficult part was inserting the shapes inside bird while considering size, shapes and area allowed.  Also had some issues with pencil following shapes over paper in journal.

challenging.  head and body proportions were of.  Body to fat.

This took awhile, and I really felt like I had blown the proportions out incorrectly for awhile,  but I thought it looked pretty good in the end.

I did it - yeah!!! it is amazing - I remember my grandson drawing upside down when he was really little, he turned out to be a cartoonist. This is the first time I have tried something like this. I thought it was fun.

It took me a long time to draw but it was a great exercise.  The most difficult part for me was the body with all the different small shapes and trying to fit them into a larger space.  I tried to cram all the tiny shapes in.

Trying again.great challenge!

As I have done more and more art and taken a few lessons I am finding I think I have a serious visual perceptual issue. I have that same facial recognition disability Brad Pitt has, I sometimes do not recognize even familiar people until I hear their voices. So I really struggle with this negative space, upside down drawing exercise as I have a huge issue with spacial relationships and proportion just looking at things the way they are, I think I have really poor visual memory. So this just does not work for me.

I was surprised at how good the bird really looked when I turned it right side up. However, all that looking from one thing to another made me kind of dizzy.

I found this exercise to be more difficult. My brain wanted to go back and draw the whole outline of the sparrow. I stuck with the process. I really focused on the negative space and it made a huge difference as far as proportion and the relationship of the wing, head and tail to the body.  I am pleasantly surprised with the results.

This was challenging but an interesting exercise.   I still saw the image as a bird, rather than being able to focus just on the shapes.  Keeping track of where I was with the lines on the branch and the breast plumage was hard, but focusing on the negative space and where the lines linked up on the body was helpful.  I was pleased with how the drawing turned out.

I found the markings on the belly and feet to be the hardest. I think it turned out better upside down than it would have right side up. 

This was much easier than I thought it would be initially.  The picture looked complicated at first but when I just concentrated on the shapes and their relation to each other, it was really manageable.  I think this turned out a lot better than if I had just tried to draw the bird.

Drawing upside-down was interesting. I looked at shapes and negative spaces. Arcs were challenging to draw. I learned so much about the subject. When I turned it to look at the final drawing, I was amazed.