Drawing a Realistic Bird Using Colored Pencils

Hi everyone, welcome to the preview video for my European Bee Eater colored pencil drawing tutorial. I am drawing this with Prismacolor Polychromos and Derwent drawing pencils on Rising Museum Mount Board, and that's the 2-ply paper from Legion Paper. I started off here working on the beak, and I was using mostly the Prismacolor Cool Gray colors in that. I was using 90%, 70% and 10% Cool Gray, and I added just a touch of the Derwent drawing Olive Earth at the very end here just to give a little bit of extra interest. Now you can see me moving on to the eye, and that flashlight you saw me using is called a blacklight flashlight, and that just helps me see where I have laid down my white pencil on white paper. Sometimes that white pencil just doesn't show up very well, so I wanted to be able to see where it was at, and that blacklight flashlight helps a lot with that process. Here I'm starting to work on the feathers on his head. I broke this drawing up into several parts. I worked on the beak, and then the eye, and then the head and the neck area. Then I worked on the rest of his body, followed by the wing, and then finally the tail and the branch, and breaking it up that way just really helped me be able to focus on one section at a time. There was so much detail in this drawing with all of these little feathers, and it just helps to take it into little sections like that. This was one of the most challenging things I have ever drawn. This is maybe the fifth or sixth bird I've drawn, so not as confident drawing birds as I am with my botanicals, but definitely learning a lot of new techniques and learning a lot with each new bird that I draw. I used a new technique on this one that I will show you coming up here in just a minute, but for the most part this was just a lot of layering. Lots of tiny little feather marks and working back and forth between the mid-tone colors and the darker colors, creating some shadows, just trying to create the look of some of these little feathers. You're not going to get a drawing like this to look exactly like the photo because there's just so much detail. I mean maybe you are, I'm not certainly, but I like to try to get it as close as possible. Went back and forth several times over all of this. Lots of layering. It's not especially important to draw every single feather from your reference image. I like to try to pull out what I think of as representative feathers, which will just give the overall impression of feathers on the drawing without having to draw every single one. I think it would be really difficult to draw every single feather. Maybe if you blew this up to a super large scale you could accomplish that, but at the scale I'm drawing in that would be impossible. So try to give the impression of those feathers without trying to draw every single one. That is honestly what makes this drawing so difficult. It's kind of like drawing veins and leaves. When I'm drawing leaves, I sometimes struggle to know how many of those tiny little veins do I need to put in? At what point do you stop? And that's similar to drawing feathers on this bird. You have to kind of pick and choose where you're going to place your emphasis and decide where you're going to stop. That was definitely a challenge for me. I'm not used to drawing something with quite this much detail, so typically on my botanical drawings I draw almost all the detail. Here I had to decide I'm going to let that one go. I don't need to draw every single one of these. This was definitely a challenge, but the more of these that I do, I'm starting to get the feel for how you can represent those feathers without drawing each of them individually. That's what I'm trying to do. You can see me starting to set up a crosshatch on some of the feathers here. Just watch how this progresses. I keep layering over and over, getting a lot of pigment down on the paper, and a lot of the indication of those feathers is going to come by drawing with the darker shadow colors on top of the light colors. When you're using colored pencil, the light colors don't typically show up very well on top of dark. You can get them to show up some, but just it's a little bit of a challenge, so using the dark pencil to kind of push up into the lighter areas is a little bit easier than trying to draw with the light on top of the dark, but I layer back and forth with both anyway. I was using a lot of the Caput Mortem from Polychromos in this area and a lot of the Prismacolor more golden tones. Here you can see me starting to use a tool called a slice tool, and I was also using just a plain old exacto knife. You can use those fairly interchangeably. I was using those tools to scratch the surface of the pencil to try to reveal some of the lighter areas that are underneath, and that also helped me get more of that fine detail than I would have been able to with just the pencils alone. So those are two tools that I'm going to practice with more in the future. This is the first time I've used either of those in an actual drawing. I've played around with them before and didn't have a lot of success for my botanical drawings, but I found that I really liked using them here. For me and the paper that I was working on and the pencils I was working with, I felt like it made a really big difference to put a lighter layer of pencil as the very base and then come over with my darker colors. Then when I scraped off the darker layers with that slice tool, they showed up a lot better than they did if I didn't have a light layer down first. So keep that in mind if you're going to try that technique. I would just recommend playing around with it on a scratch piece of paper before you try it on your drawing, which I spent a lot of time doing. And now I'm just starting to work on what I think was the very most challenging part of this drawing, if not the most challenging thing I've ever worked on was the wing for this bird. There was so much detail in here, and all of these feathers were going so many different directions, and there were several separate sections that I was trying to keep track of as well. It looked a bit of a mess for a while here, but I just kept working back and forth and finally got it to a place that I'm happy with. I'm already anxious to draw another one to see if I can improve on what I did here. So much of drawing with colored pencils just comes down to practice, and I've practiced for years drawing botanicals, and I need to do that same practice with my birds before I'm too critical of myself. So keep that in mind if you're a beginner. It just takes time. You'll discover new techniques along the way, and then you can apply those to your next drawing, and you'll find new techniques in that drawing, and you can apply those to the next, and in everything all of your skills will just start to build on each other, but I did work on this for I think two and a half, three hours, just this wing area. So lots of back and forth. Again, what made it probably the most difficult was just making those decisions about what details to try to include and what details to leave out, and that's where I think the practice will come in handy is just having more of an instinct for that. Here on this area, you can see how I laid that really light layer of white pencil plus some May green from Polychromos, and now I'll go over that with the darker colors, and when I use the slice tool to scrape up the darker colors, those lighter colors will show up a lot better than if I didn't have that layer down first. Something about just going straight in over the white of the paper, it just doesn't seem to work quite as well, and I went back and forth a few different times doing that. It's using a lot of permanent green olive. That's kind of the main color you can see in this wing. Also some lime green and May green. Actually, it's lime peel. Prismacolor lime peel. Polychromos May green. Also going back and forth as the wing moves toward the back of the bird, trying to go back and forth with some of the greens and yellows and incorporate those so I had a nice transition there. Using that slice tool one more time. I felt like the slice tool gave me a little bit thicker line than the X-Acto knife. The X-Acto knife pulled up really fine lines, and I don't know. Those might come in different sizes, so it might depend on what size X-Acto knife you have. I'm not even sure about that, but my slice tool pulled up a nice thick line, so I found that I was using that more than the X-Acto knife. Now I'm starting to work on his tail, which was so easy compared to what I had just finished up, so it's a little bit of a relief here. Same with as I move on to the branch, something that I'm much more familiar with drawing, but I still try to put as much time and effort into these other areas as I did with the wing with the rest of the bird. You don't want to relax too much because you want to make sure you give the same amount of effort into all the parts of the drawing so that they look good. Having the branch there for this bird to rest on really makes a big difference. The main thing that I try to do with the branch or any branches that I'm drawing is just to make sure I have some directional lines there to give the appearance of a 3D feel, and the second important thing is that you add a lot of texture, but as far as making it perfect compared to the reference image, that's just not something that I try to do when I'm working on branches. It's an area you can relax and just be a little bit more creative and have some more fun with because it's a branch, so it's just not going to matter that much. I did spend some time on this knot here. I did want to make sure that it looked 3D and that it looked realistic, so I was careful with some of those lines. I'm blending over all of this with my solvent. The edges of this branch were more out of focus as it moved into the center. It was more in focus, so I tried to capture that on the drawing. After my Gamsol dries, I always come back through and add a second layer of pencil and really sharpen up any kind of details and do some color correction, make sure everything looks perfect or perfect enough. Going back over that knot just to make sure I got it right. I used the same yellows in the branch that I did in the bird just for some consistency. You can see that I've turned my paper to the side. That just makes it easier for me to get those vertical lines. Here is my final drawing. If that video moved way too fast for you and you're interested in learning how to draw this yourself, you can check out my Patreon over at www.patreon.com. I have several hours of real-time footage of drawing this bird all while narrating and explaining to you what I'm doing and what colors I'm choosing and why, so check that out if you're interested. Otherwise, I will be back next week with another drawing. Bye everybody!