
Drawings capture movement, a feeling, better than photographs do. You look carefully and you emphasise some things while skimming over others. In that sense drawings are more like the eye sees, selectively.
I love photographing birds; photographs capture the moment, allow you to notice detail later, form a basis to identify something again in future,. Best of all they capture behaviour, and how things change over the seasons and over time.
But when you draw you notice so much more. That is why I hope to learn from this. When you draw from a photograph, you have all the time in the world, and you obsess, and sometimes the more you correct the worse it looks. Drawing from real life you have to be decisive, capture the essence, so notice the essence and then translate it into a few lines quickly. I have done a little of it but not much. Things never stay still for long enough and I can never remember the detail of how they look once they have moved. So often I end up doing composites of different birds, say. Not great, but I make do.
I struggled with the proportions - head way too big for the body, so the body had to grow. I just could not get the shape of the top of the head right - it is rounded yet flat, and this is the best I could manage, but it does not quite capture it. I find the feathers with a pale edge so difficult to do, and their angle and the way they overlap. and somehow, I kept drawing the legs for a bird that was slightly turned towards me, but the body in profile. I could not get it right!
I did not dare colour this. So many times I draw something just about respectable, and then add colour and it looks like a five year old drew it. I hope to learn to colour things so they enhance the picture