This was a very good exercise for observation and concentration. To keep motivated , I amigined the Song sparrow singing  Diana Ross’ hit: ‘Upside Down, you’re turning me’ ;)  The most tricky part for me was  keeping  the mutual  angles  of the branch, the legs  and bird’s posture  right.  But ,once again,  concentrating on negative spaces helped me to move on.  I also ‘discovered’ a technique to draw the complex irregular stripe patterns. I first jot many tiny dots outlining  the negative space with the adjacent stripe till and then I strenghten the contour with a more solid line.

Upside-down drawing was really fun. At first it was difficult getting the right proportions, until my mom came and told me to sketch the outline first 😅, which I forgot to do. That really helped me get the right proportions, and I'm really proud of myself for doing a pretty good job! I hope to improve on drawing upside-down subjects!

Y’all, I promise I measured proportions when I drew this poor sparrow. There’s a reason I’m taking this class, and I’m so thankful that my livelihood does not depend on my artistic abilities. All-in-all, it’s not too bad, but I have to laugh at his truncated head. 😂

Another great drawing exercise to hone the skills.   Fun to do.  Will do this exercise again.

That was HARD, but worth it! Learned alot.

This took a long time and I really spent the time trying to see the different shapes.  I did not get the proportions exactly right - but that will come with practice.  

I've done this exercise before, and it's usually successful.  I don't always generalize that skill to drawing live objects.  It was fun, but doesn't really help me much when it comes to the real thing.  Here's my attempt.  I saw it as a collection of shapes and lines.

Drawing from as a colection of shapes made me real look for the shapes without being concerned to proportions, or how it looks like. Because of that, to my view, getting shapes correct made me focus really hard. Such a level of brain focus made me draw a quite more accurate picture then I'm used to do. The exercise is really good. Probably I will do it more and more, as the ones of gesture drawing.

I did not really think I could do a good job of this exercise, but slowing down and focusing on the details and proportions yielded a solid effort! Perhaps a little fat, but so are the birds at my birdfeeder :)

I've tried this technique before and found that I was more successful if I only revealed one piece of the picture at a time so that I didn't get ahead of myself .  It is a wonderful trick that builds up my confidence and is easy to practice using photos .  I know a wonderful artist who likes to look at things upside down before she starts painting and it sure works for her!

A very interesting exercise.  Great way to train my brain to stop just "drawing a bird" and focus on looking.

It was harder than I thought it would be.  I kept wanting to turn the image and i got a bit confused with the shapes, but it turned out better than I thought.  Interesting exercise.  I'll try it again to teach my brain some new tricks.  

My bird looks OK but it's nothing like the example at all.  I started and erased the entire thing several times.  I started at different parts, the top of the stem of the grass like Liz did, then from the other side.  My bifocal glasses made it hard to do, so I printed a copy of the example to a sheet of paper and laid it flat so I could see it better.  That didn't help much, I must have started and erased numerous times.  Still all in all the picture I ended up with looks pretty good but it's not like the example in many areas.  It was fun but I got pretty frustrated during the process.  I think I'll do it again a few times just to see how different each one turns out.

I found it difficult, at some points a bit tedious but very good practice.

It was so difficult because I always draw like it is in reality. Yeah I always draw as it was. As a collection of shapes.

Upside down is interesting!  It was easier to just deal with shapes and proportion.  This is going to take some (a lot of) practice to sort areas into just shapes while in the field!

This was fun. I think the bird turned out really good and I promise I didn't turn it till the end.

This was a difficult drawing exercise for me.  I focused only on creating shapes and negative spacing between them.  However, I tried to scale up the drawing to use up all of my paper and that caused problems with connecting the wings and other body parts.  Actual size vs illustration is challenging and makes me realize that I am more interested in capturing the form and features and not have to make them to actual size.  

I focused on the shapes and also used the negative spaces and measuring techniques. This was fun!

I viewed the bird as what it was, but I made some lines to  have the proportions as correct as  possible. A good training.

I drew an upside-down parakeet, from a model. next page......with cardinal. getting better at being more time efficient.bk

This was very difficult for me, not because the image was upside down. Getting angles and proportions right is still a bit of s struggle, yet I am grateful for this exercise. This photo is my second attempt. I still learned something even up to the very end where the stomach patterns weren't quite fitting and I had to adjust. I think it had to do with me jumping around on the picture rather than focusing on a section and following it.