Almost Birding

It's been ages since we last posted - year 11 has been a strain on both of us! It's my first year ever at school (formerly home educated) so I've been spending 99.9% of my birding time just trying to keep up.
Even though I haven't been able to bird, I have had a bit of time to do my next favourite thing - draw.

After posting a couple of my recent drawings to the Next Generation Birders facebook page (a mainly British but worldwide group of young birders, of which I am one of the few Australian representatives) I've had a couple of questions about how exactly I do it. So this post will be a sort of step-by-step one about my drawing and graphic art! Bird drawings, of course...

The drawing I'm going to use for this post is of a female Purple-throated Mountain Gem, a hummingbird from Costa Rica. Usually what I do when I start a drawing is have a peek around the internet for interesting photographs to copy on paper. I chose this photograph from Deep Green Photography: 
http://deepgreenphotography.photoshelter.com/gallery-image/flying-jewels/G0000wXp39SZr7f8/I00004yklf0tIzzc/C0000xHY18MjZBKI

This isn't my best drawing, but it's the only one I remembered to take screen captures of as I made it!

Just before I start, I am in no way an artist, I don't even take art at school - it's just something I do in my spare time, for fun :).

Materials used:

• A sheet of A4 blank paper
• Two sharp 2B pencils (never use HB. Ever. Don't do it. Just don't.)
• Eraser and pencil sharpener
• Scanner
• Adobe Photoshop CS6 (I imagine any version of PS could be used, or any number of other programs)
• Grab (for screenshots)

Okay!
The first thing I do when I see a photo I like is sketch it on paper. I use a super-sharpened 2B pencil on ordinary A4 paper (the biggest our scanner can take). The paper quality doesn't really count for much, because I won't be needing it by a third of the way through the process.
I do all my sketches freehand, otherwise it feels like cheating! And I suspect it might bring up some copyright issues...
I tend to put a fair amount of detail into the sketches, but it isn't really necessary. Just basic outlines and indications of the coloured areas will do.

Here's my finished sketch, scanned into the computer and opened in Photoshop CS6:

 Photoshop is where I'll be doing the majority of my work on the drawing.

The next step is to create a new layer in Photoshop, then carefully use the paintbrush to draw in the lines, following the ones you drew on the paper. I usually use a size 2 brush at 100% hardness and opacity.
It can be quite a painstaking process, but it ends up well worth doing right the first time.

 

Here's the drawing with the lines added, as you can see the painted lines are superimposed over the drawn ones. It's important you do this in a new layer, otherwise when you go to modify the background, it will affect your lines.

The next thing I do is create a background for the drawing. Using a mixture of colours (greens, in this case) and the Gaussian blur filter, you can create an artificial bokeh similar to that created with a camera.

Use the eyedropper tool to choose colours from the original image if you get stuck picking the ones you need. Essentially, put splodges of light and dark colours where you want them to end up in the finished picture. In the above screenshot, you can see the splodges I've used, and here...:

... what happens when the Gaussian blur filter is applied. Just be aware, saving this file as a Jpeg later on will result in some ripple-like marks on the background caused by file compression - saving as a screenshot solves the problem, but you can't get the same size (in pixels). I haven't found a way to counteract or circumnavigate the problem yet.

So now we're done with the background, we can move onto the actual drawing.

It's important from here on in to make sure you do each "thing" in a new layer - it can save so much time and heartbreak if you stuff up. For example, I made a new layer for "stem", "leaves", "flower", and then various layers for different parts of the bird. Deleting a layer and starting over from there is so, so, so much easier than having to start the whole thing again from scratch.

So, the next layer. I started with the simplest bit of the picture - the stem of the plant. Simple dark brown and darker brown (close to black), painting using a fairly thick brush to make a simple two-toned colouring. Darker on the bottom obviously, as it's the shadow. I then use the "smudge" tool to meld the two colours together. I love the smudge tool.

When you're painting shapes (especially small ones), the magnetic lasso tool is awesome. Just click, and select the bit you want - tidy it up using the ordinary lasso if you need to.

When painting shadows, you have to use your imagination a bit - decide where the light(s) are coming from, then figure out where the shadows will be.

 Here it is after painting and smudging.

Next, leaves! Essentially when I'm painting, I just do the smallest and simplest bits first, and leave the really complicated stuff for later. I make a lot of mistakes, and if I do complicated things first, then undoing them all is impossible... not fun. Don't be afraid to just forget the rest of the drawing, zoom right in, and focus all your attention on the bit you're working on.

For the leaves, fairly bright colours to make them stand out a bit from the background, but not so bright as to seem unnatural. In this drawing, the lights are coming mainly from straight ahead (camera flash) and a little from above, so making leaves facing the 'camera' slightly paler helps add to that effect.

Start with a green in the middle of the light and dark colours you intend to use for patches of light and shadow, and colour the whole leaf in. Then trace the edges with the lights and darks, before smudging it all together. Doing this before adding any markings (like veins) on the leaves can be helpful.

The first few leaves...

...And the rest. Just remember to keep selecting the new leaf you're working on with the lasso tool, otherwise things get stupidly messy. I did all the leaves in one layer, but feel free to make a new layer for each leaf - the more layers, the safer you are against accidents.

Now to start on the flower. Basic colour (red) to start with.

Then branch out using pinks, darker reds, and even yellows (on very low opacity) to bring some "life" into the flower, and some more natural looking shadows and highlights.

At this point, I made a new layer, and started on the front of the bird, using the lasso to select a portion of the front. When working on birds, I usually create new layers based on colours - so the layer I'm working on here would include all the tan areas of the birds plumage. It might be the same for another layer containing all the green bits, or all the red bits, etc. etc. etc.

Using the eyedropper tool to collect a few colours from the photograph, then modifying the choices (moving the selector around on the colour field) to better match my own version, I made a mix of tans/fawns and browns. I started off colouring the whole bird in the palest of the colours you can see above, then worked in the shadows along the bird's belly. The shadow of the wing was done using black on very low opacity to create a better looking shadow. Again, for the main shadow on the belly, smudge is your friend! To look natural, you want the shadow of the wing to be clearly defined, so only add it in after you're done smudging everything else.

Feather texture is something I'm still working on. At the moment, I'm working with "add noise" then "motion blur" under filters to create the streaky effect of feathers in sharp focus. Here's what I do:
Above you can see an simple area of colour, the dark area around the eye, smudged into the way I want it to look.

Using the "add noise" filter, I adjust it to the maximum amount of noise I can use without the end result being too heavily distorted. It differs for every drawing, so have a play around. 

Then, use the "motion blur" filter to make the noise streaky. You can adjust the direction of the motion blur, so I adjusted it to match the general lie of the feathers on the bird's body. Sadly, you can't do squiggly lines (which would add more realism to the drawing), but I've made do.

 So now that we've done that, we can move onto the other sections of the bird, creating a new layer, selecting, colouring, shading, adding texture. You can start to see the bird "appear" off the background, which is always nice!

When you've finished with texture, if the section is fully enclosed by other coloured sections, you can take the next step and add some "fraying" to the edges - neat lines are rare in nature, so making the edges of sections look a little frayed or spiky can help out a lot in the big picture (pun sort of intended). I say only do this where the section is fully enclosed, because if you fray out onto undeveloped sections, it just makes selecting that section for development later a pain.

Eyes and catchlights can be tricky. Thankfully this one was fairly easy. Being a fairly small eye, just a simple black circle and tiny white dot did the trick - if I was doing a head study or a larger picture, I'd need to put more work into it. I also included a size-1 line of white paint around the eye, just to help it maintain its definite shape in its dark surroundings.

Now we can take a step back, zoom out, and assess how we're going. Overall, so far, pleased with the results, and plenty more work to go. Go and have a drink, give yourself a break, go birding, then press on.

The next stage - the back. Keeping the "lines" layer in front of the new layer you make for the back helps when visualizing the patterns that will go on later. The normal selecting, paining, shading, and smudging for this bit.

 
Making a start on the iridescent feathers on the head: for this, I just used dots of colour, then used pale and dark versions of that colour to edge it, then smudged it all together. This seems to work well for me. I used dark blue and bright green to emulate the photograph.

The tail was nice and simple, I just used basic browns and smudged away.

Leaving the 'back-bling' for now, and moving onto the browns on the wing, this should all be getting pretty standard procedure by now.

Colour... smudge... noise... blur... *yawn*

Adding slightly stronger lines of brown for the feather margins

Once the wings are done, the moment of truth - take the eraser, and go and take out the outlines of the bird from the lines layer. Hopefully the shape stays the same!! 

You can then smudge the outlines a bit, so they don't look quite so artificial. I also coloured the feet.

Now for some more interesting stuff - the colours on the back. Here the challenge is to make each of the feathers distinguishable from the rest, so lots of dark and pale edging used here. Adding a little more dark to the belly also helped with the natural look.

At this point, I realised that I'd forgotten a bit of the flower - oops. I touched that up here.

 

Last looks.... one head? check, two wings, beak? check...

And the finished product!
Overall, I'm pretty happy with this. Looking back, I probably should have left more gaps between the coloured feathers on the rump, but I don't think it's that bad.

This is all just for fun, I'm not looking to make masterpieces, so I called it quits at this point. There's probably a few more things I could/should have done, but after about 20 hours all up, I was getting a bit tired of it! :P

All suggestions, comments, suggestions for a next drawing, welcome!!

Until I can actually go birding....
Julian