suburban sketches: Drawing 2 Work for Assessment Feather drawings of birds

"Make a drawing of a subject of your choice using the subject itself, or tools constructed from the subject, dipped in ink or paint."
I share my house with my daughters cockateil and a budgie who was dumped outside a vets and I often find their feathers when I clean them out so it was a logical step to use the feathers to paint a bird. The birds are difficult to draw because they move so much so I practiced a bit by taking some photos to work from in my sketchbook using fineliner and felt tip, softened with water.

Then did some rough drawings from life using a multicoloured pencil (somehow my dog crept onto the page too).

For guidance I looked back at the RSPB Guide to Drawing Birds which has some excellent drawings. A lot of the pictures are of static birds rendered very carefully. John Busby and Eric Ennion managed to keep the pictures lively using a few well placed lines. David Measures is better know for painting butterflies in flight, he worked in loose watercolour and his fingers to suggest rather than define his subject. I also Googled bird drawings and found Charles David Viera and this is the sort of thing I want to achieve with my bird pictures.

Experiments with feathers, first with drawing ink, using the end of the feather as a quill. Then the body of the feather as a brush and to make a feather shaped print.

On the left I tried dipping the feathers in crushed charcoal to make a print which was too feint to be much use,

and on the right watercolour paint which seemed to have the most potential so I tested it on some newspaper, a paper bag that had contained bread and a scrap of sugar paper.

The fluid patch of green on the sugar paper is a nice shape, grass in sunlight.

I tried mixed bright colours on proper watercolour paper.

I like the way the feathers apply paint in a random fashion so that the resultant image owes a lot to chance. This makes me work more freely, the only way to paint the bird is to suggest the shape so it is particularly well suited to the movement of birds in flight.

I had fun painting birds from my memory/imagination.

I think this picture is a bit overworked.

This is my favourite image but I don't know if you would recognise the bird if you weren't told first. Is the sea in the foreground a bit weak?

I did a few more birds to see if I could work into them more, and have more background without loosing the freshness and immediacy of the original idea.