My refined drawing.

It is getting easier to draw what I see… I think.  Proportion is getting better.  It is still kind of cold in Minnesota so I have been drawing from pictures.  Not exactly nature journaling but it’s working.  I have ordered a pencil tip eraser.  I think that will help with ‘white’ details a bit better.  It seems like things take a long time.  This took about an hour, maybe a bit more.  I need to work on “quick” sketches.  Negative spaces are getting a bit easier.

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espero volver en unos días y subir el saltapared

Proportion and negative space are coming more naturally now.

I'm finding that negative space is really coming into play now, as well as different strokes of the pencil to create that illusion of texture! Though I still need help in finding the highlights and shadows its an improvement that I'm able to bring attention to it! My outlining could blend in with the drawing a little more, but my overall sketching skills have 100 percent improved!!! Thanks, Liz!!!

I had a lot of trouble with my first attempt to refine a gesture drawing. I chose the marsh wren, which I thought was a pretty good foundation, but found that I was basically redrawing the entire thing. I gave up and moved on to the fox, which ended up being more proportional and easier to adjust. I found the advice to "imply" rather than fully draw feathers and hair very helpful, and discovered that as I kept layering more "suggestions" of the fox's coat it actually started to look like fur. The other technique I've found super helpful is paying attention to negative space. What's coming naturally for me is to draw quick and scribbly, and I find it hard to stick to other mark-making techniques even when I'm trying to experiment with them.

Looking at the negative space and the proportions have really helped me improve my drawings.  I find I'm drawing what is actually there rather than what I think should be there. 

This was another fun exercise and I think I will keep going back to some previous images to refine them.  I still need to practice and refine my line shading techniques to improve the dimensions of my sketches.

What a lovely bird, now I want to see one when I next visit the USA. The negative shape and proportions measuring really helped me. Normally my birds look quite wonky. Feel like I am making progress!

I was able to go back and make this bird a lot more detailed using my negative space and correcting proportions. I find that I seem to be able to eyeball the correct proportions better than using a measuring technique. The negative space has been a great help for me though! Here are my before and after drawings:

Such a useful exercise. I refined my tree frog gesture drawing. The final result is hardly a work of art, but it was a hugely valuable exercise - I looked closely at the subject and did a lot of trial and error. I'll have to keep trying this with my field guides.

The techniques are helping a lot. The measurement and negative space techniques are very helpful in getting the proportions right.

so, when i first started refining my gesture drawing, i was a little overwhelmed by just how unrefined and inaccurate my gesture was; now i can see how crucial it is to get the general drawing accurate before even thinking about the details! However, it proved to be pretty good bones to work off of, and i very much enjoyed adding the details once i got into it, especially the feather patterns and texture!

Getting a good understanding of negative space was definitely helpful, as I already used it little bit unconsciously. Proportions are probably one of the most difficult drawing skills to master, but also one of, if not the most, important. Also, gesture drawing was surprisingly fun and helped me to loosen up a lot. P.s — i added a picture of the original gesture, a more refined drawing, and the finished result. :)

I used a blending stump for the shading (easier and quicker than to just use pencil. I really like how this turned out.

Looking at the negative spaces is the most helpful technique for me, because it helps me to check out the ratio between different patterns of shapes. I would like to see the overall collection of the shapes and the relationship between each shape. However, I found the "upside-down" technique is more difficult for me. Because I don't usually draw birds in the upside-down orientation.

The Negative Space exercise helped me get the proportions and positions ofthe bird more accurate

I enjoyed refining and adding detail.  All the techniques are really helpful.  I look forward to gaining more experience.

Okay, first of all, refining that gesture drawing was very challenging. More than once I found myself thinking that it’d be easier to draw the bird from scratch :D I chose that bird (the swamphen) because I thought it was the most ‘accurate’ of all the 60-sec and 30-sec photos. Yet I had to erase and draw from scratches several parts of the subject (body, legs, wings) because they were disproportionate and/or misplaced.

Paying attention to proportions and negative space was a game changer. The former helped me loads with the legs (I had to shift the neck and breast to the right when I noticed that I couldn’t draw the leg right - so I also rectified the size of the head as it was way too narrow!). The latter was decisive when it came to drawing the legs. I couldn’t keep the right space between the legs at knee height, and I soon realised it was because I’d drawn the left foot too big, which forced me to draw the right leg too long. I adjusted the two and the right proportions materialised on paper. A super useful (though frustrating here and there - but that’s part of the game!) exercise.

PS. I took a photo of both the gesture-drawing version and the refined version.

This took a lot of effort but rewarding as I did not think I could do it.  The negative space as well as checking the proportions/scale were very helpful.

I used a new image and drew a 60-second gesture drawing from it. At first, it seemed that nothing would come of it. My exercise book is too small to add details easily. However, the result is better than it appeared at first. Darkening certain points clarified the image and gave it shape; I'm getting better at it. Still, getting the proportions right takes practice. I chose a picture where it was not easy to use the negative space. After all, I'm quite satisfied. This was an encouraging task.