Jen

1. I felt grateful this bird was in profile and in a pretty easy pose to get down— fairly straight body position with the tail just a bit up— and that it was a photo and not moving! Getting the basic shapes— mostly one small circle and two bigger circles— was pretty easy, but getting their proportions right was not easy at all for me, and deciding how and where to overlap them was not easy. Even just sticking to the basic outlines of major feather groups, drawing the feather patterns in was not easy, especially getting the size & proportions and set at the correct angles. The color patterns were pretty straightforward on this bird, even if I’m not very experienced with watercolor.   2. Taking the time to draw the image definitely helped me focus on details that are easy to overlook, such as the angles at which the legs come out of the body, the shapes of the toes before the talons, the different feather patterns (even if I chose not to the draw them today) and how the different feather groups were lying. The way the primaries stack up only really became clear when I was studying the drawing to sketch it. I think if I were outside and nature journaling, rather than rendering from a photo, I’d only have time to notice one or two features in a session in any detail though, looking at birds live as they flit around, but I might be more apt to capture something that represents the birds motion in its environment rather than a static image as in a photograph.