Printables: Just everyday birds
It's easy to disregard common backyard bird species. Draw them instead!
The first week of June has been unexpectedly busy at the tiny cabin: bird drawing commissions, research for upcoming video posts, my annual summer art market at the local museum, planting the herbs and native flowers we’ll draw later in the summer. This week, I’ll be catching up on a few things I’ve been wanting to share with you:
Tomorrow, the third printable set (jays) will post, to complement the house sparrow and mockingbird printables in this post. I hope they will inspire you to take a closer look at the ordinary birds you see every day.
Wednesday, I’ll be here adding the latest month to my butterfly phenology wheel. (This month, I was startled to see a butterfly who typically does not venture this far south. I’m thrilled to add him to my wheel!)
Friday, I’ll post a new video in the Summer Field Guide series. We’ll use a loose, playful technique to paint black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta) outdoors. Besides being beautiful and extremely hardy, they are a favorite food source for pollinator insects and songbirds.
But, back to our printables.
A few weeks ago, I saw some new work by a bird artist in the UK whose work I admire. It was a wonderful, vibrant painting of a male cardinal in flight. In the caption of the image, she said she had never actually seen a cardinal, but she was struck by their singular beauty and she hoped someday to travel to North America and see one.
I’m ashamed to admit that I live in the midst of so many cardinals that I scarcely look up when I hear their loud, metallic chirp in a nearby tree. I take them for granted. It’s easy to become desensitized to the charm of the birds we see around us day after day.
Drawing a bird requires us to look at it carefully - to pay attention. And paying attention to anything can lead to a deeper understanding. Here are some tips for sketching two common backyard birds who, admittedly, might be considered nuisances at times. But each has unique features that make it a wonderful drawing subject:
