TUTORIAL | How To Draw An American Kestrel In Colored Pencil | Bird of Prey Drawing

Hi everyone and welcome back to my channel. In today's video I'm going to be sharing my process in how I drew this beautiful American Kestrel in coloured pencil. The pencils I used were Faber-Castell Polychromos and Caran d'Ache Luminance and a Derwent drawing pencil. A couple of other tools I also used were an electric eraser and a blending pencil. So 9 times out of 10 when starting a bed drawing I usually start with the eye and that is what I'm doing in this case. I started by outlining the edge of the eye with a black polychromos pencil and then I proceeded to fill in the eye making all those really dark tones and then using a mixture of precious to fill in the highlights. I then used a yellow pencil to draw the ring around the eye and then while I was also holding this pencil I decided to fill in the yellow part of the beak. Just adding a tinge of burnt ochre to bring in some of those yellow shadows and then from there I went back to the eye area to start mapping out the feather direction of those really dark tones. This is where I'm starting to look at those really small curves and also make sure I've got a nice sharp pencil to really capture the fineness of those feathers because the feathers of the Kestrel's head are really fine and soft I really wanted to capture that. So I then pivoted to the lighter feathers, I started out with a base layer, I think it was the Rorumba 10%, the Caran d'Ache luminance pencil and then I switched to some darker grey tones to map out the general feather direction. All the time I'm keeping my pencil strokes really close together which is something I always talk to my students about if they want to capture the fineness of feathers, by keeping those lines really close together it's going to help with that fineness and the detail. So colour wise I generally use steel grey and slate grey for those bluey grey feathers and then for those chestnut orange tone feathers I switched to my burnt ochre 10% which is a really light peachy tone that's great for those underlying base tones and the lighter parts of the feathers and then I mixed up the dark tones with a burnt ochre and burnt sienna polychromos pencil. The burnt sienna is a really great pencil for darkening those orange rusty tones and also for capturing those really tiny little shadows that lie within the feathers. So you can see here I'm applying a shade of cream over the lighter parts of the feathers and that is just to tint the general orange tone into more of a creamy yellow sort of tone. It just warms those lighter feathers up a little. Here I'm starting to work on richening up the blacks. You may have seen me use a Derwent Drawing ivory black pencil, that is one of the richest darkest black pencils I have used and it's really useful if you want to saturate your blacks to a really rich level. Sometimes when you apply lots of layers to a coloured pencil drawing you can lose the tooth of the paper a little and a polychromos pencil is sometimes a little too shiny on top. So the Derwent Drawing is a really great matte rich black which is great for those really deep tones. I think it just helps to give the drawing a little bit of an extra contrast as well. Here is one of those areas where I'm using my point and being really careful around the edges of each segment. Just making sure that the details are really tiny and that they splay out into the various sections. This just helps to give a little bit more realism and also brings out the fineness of those feathers. Just like I mentioned earlier I really wanted to make the feathers look really fine and really soft and super detailed as well. So moving onto these larger feathers, I started by putting out those really dark shapes. That just helps me to eyeball certain areas so that I can keep track on the whole piece and don't lose myself in all those complex shapes. So the most prominent or the most bold shapes that I see within a drawing are always the areas that I start on first. And then to avoid being intimidated by all the white of the paper I've gone over with a base layer of my Burnt Oak 10% which is the same peach tone that I used in the head And then I went in with a slightly darker shade of the Burnt Ochre, the Burnt Ochre 50% it was and started to plot out the basic shadows within each of these feather clumps. And then going over with my Burnt Ochre focusing on the really dark orange tones, really richening those up with a little bit more pressure. So I didn't want to focus on just the orange tones for these feathers because that isn't really very realistic. I introduced a little of the walnut brown just to earth and neutralise everything up. But I made sure that the Burnt Ochre range were the main colours for these feathers. I used a mixture of pressures, mainly quite a firm pressure in those really dark rich shadows and then a lighter pressure for the lighter parts where the light was hitting the tops of those clumps. And then from there it was quite a repetitive process going back and forth between the darks and saturating those peachy tones in the lights. And then for the details on the edges of each individual shape I went in with a really fine Burnt Sienna to replicate those tiny shadows that lie underneath. And here I'm really saturating those light peach tones by going over with a firm pressure of my Burnt Ochre 10%. This not only helps to richen up those peach tones but it also helps to smooth out the pencil texture. The feathers of the Kestrel appear to be really smooth and soft so I really wanted to replicate that by eliminating as much of the pencil grain as I could. And then a few touches of my electric eraser as well just to pull out some of the highlights on the edges of those splayed feathers. So you may have seen on some of my previous videos that an electric eraser is one of my favourite tools for coloured pencil work. Something I always recommend when applying an electric eraser is always to go back in with a slightly darker colour after you've erased the pigment because the pigment can erase quite a lot of what is on the paper and reduce that colour down to the white of the paper underneath and sometimes that white is too bright. So you can see here I've gone back in with a darker pencil just to tone down the brightness of those highlights and they now appear much softer. So this bit here was really satisfying to do and it's really satisfying to watch as well because we can really see those black spots come back to life again. Right at the very beginning when I applied those black spots I wasn't doing them as a final finish, I just did them as a plotting out process just to keep tabs on the placement of each of those clumps of feathers. So now that I've got the bulk of the colours in place I can go back in with my really rich blacks to make them pop. So now that I have the docks in place my brain can now see those values that need adjusting and this is where I start to work a little bit more on the rich tones and just do a little bit of refining of the values. These grey feathers followed a very similar process, I started by blocking out all the individual shapes and then plotted my shadows before going in with a base layer. Something that was really important to me within these feathers is making sure that they were nice and smooth so eliminating a lot of the pencil texture was something that I really wanted to work on in this drawing. I could have used some odourless mineral spirits but I chose to build up the softness with lots of layers instead and I chose mainly my Caran d'Ache luminance pencils which are great for blending and great for building a soft and buttery texture when blended together through layers. And what I'm doing here is something I call polychromos polishing and that is going in with a polychromos pencil, a really sharp point, a very similar tone to the feathers in general and applying a firm pressure over all of that pencil texture and that just helps to give a really soft and silky appearance to those feathers. And then I do exactly the same with a white pencil just to lift a little bit of light from the tops of those feathers and that process along with the polychromos polishing process really helps to bring out that silky softness. So for the tail feathers here I'm applying my do and join black for some really rich blacks. I'm also polishing the overall black tone with my black polychromos pencil to eliminate as much of that paper grain as I can. In the full length class on Patreon I discuss how I drew the tips for these highlighted edges. So if you want to draw along to this full tutorial on my Patreon, everything's in real time with full narrated instruction throughout, you can do that, the link is in the description box. So for the tail feathers I use pretty much the same colour palette as I did for the head feathers. So I've been applying some bird ochre and bird sienna and a little bit of walnut brown. And of course making sure that that shadow underneath the wing feathers is really dark just to help with that depth. These belly feathers had a completely different colour palette to the rest of the kestrel although I did start with the same process of blocking out those dark shapes and then I started to use those as marker points and work around them to build up my shadows and midtones. So into the shadows I introduced some brown ochre, some walnut brown, olive brown and some dark sepia. And then for the lighter parts of the feathers, for that neutral earthy sort of tone I added some french grey 10% and some olive brown 10% and I applied that to the lighter areas and also mixed it very gently into those shadows as well. So as I'm plotting out the colour placement for these belly feathers I'm also going back and forth with the point of my pencil to introduce some detail in the form of those splayed feathers. So I'm both using dark pencils to replicate the shadows behind those splayed feathers and also a touch of my electric eraser for the highlighted ones that stand out above darker shadows. And then when it looks as though the belly feathers are nearly complete I always go back in to emphasise those darks and richen up the colours. Making sure that the shadow underneath the wing feathers is nice and deep for that extra depth. Working on the browns, making sure that they are deep browns and also those slightly golden tones just to give the feathers a little bit of a glow. And then finally finishing off with richening up those black spots. The feet of the bird were fairly straight forward, starting with a sharp black polychromos pencil for the claws. And then plotting out the shadows and the lights using my burnt ochre pencil, a firm pressure for the shadows and a lighter pressure for the lights. A little bit of yellow for that reflective glow. And then some refining and tweaking with my burnt sienna to add some details. So apart from finishing off with the branch that the bird is set upon and the final tweaking. This tutorial is just about coming to a close, so just a reminder if you are interested the full real time tutorial can be found over on my Patreon channel, everything is in real time with clear instruction throughout and it's there waiting for you if you are interested. So I'm just about wrapping up this tutorial now, I'm just putting the finishing touches together. I always go in with a sharp black polychromos pencil just to tweak the darks and I overlook everything at the end to see where I can adjust my values, pump up the contrast, maybe richen some of the colours and brighten some of the highlights. It's all part of the tidying up polishing process that I do at the end of every drawing. So I hope you like the finished result and I hope you've enjoyed this video. Thank you so much for watching, take care and I'll see you in the next one.