Thoughts on sketching birds:
- Birds are difficult to capture
- Sketching from many different photos helps build familiarity and notice small subtleties between different individuals, species or subspecies, male and female, juvenile and adult
- Noticing things such as body shape, head size, feather patterns, markings, geometry of the beak and eyes and face, common positions
- Sometimes when I draw birds they look very strange and alien during, sometimes their shapes are not intuitive. Leaving a sketch for a while and then returning and choosing some favorites from the sketches helps to choose one that looks the most immediately appealing.
