How to draw birds
Creation
The book came to mind during my own research in learning to draw birds and the desire to teach others tricks on how to draw a realistic bird.
It first started off with a few of my own studies of birds, how their wings worked, how their feet gripped branches, and all the intricate feather details that they had. I didn’t want to just be good at drawing birds, I wanted to capture their personalities in every movement. One of the toughest challenges was how to draw birds flying and how to make it easy to draw by breaking the wings down into simple shapes to memorise.
What is a Passerine?
While the book is not a step-by-step guide of drawing birds, it’s meant as a guide to when the artist gets stuck on a detail - they can easily go to the correct anatomical page to understand how it works. For example, drawing birds’ legs it gives a couple of sample poses to use which might help with posing feet on your own drawing.
A Passerine is any bird that belongs in the Passeriformes order commonly known as perching birds or song birds. They are distinguished by the shape of their feet; three toes pointing forward and one toe for the back. Passerines are 60% of the world's bird species and learning the fundamentals can assist in drawing any bird in the other 40% with their unique anatomical adaptations for their habitat.
This will help establish a base of how to draw birds with a series of books, which can continue into other orders such as drawing birds of prey, waterfowl, parrots etc.
Why the Bluethroat bird
The species featured throughout is the Red-spotted Bluethroat (Luscinia svecica svecica).
How to use the book
This book is for those who wish to improve their bird drawing skills; for beginners as well as for artists who already understand some of the basics of drawing and want to take it to the next level. It is intended as a reference guide when learning anatomy or physics for realistic and credible bird art.
It is a small companion book, ideal to carry anywhere when drawing from life, the field or in your own studio.
