A Delightful Week of Bird Drawing And learning about ‘birbness’
To help demonstrate July’s Weeds & Wildflowers prompt, I drew the charming little bird from the photo by?Christine Morris Ph.D.
I chose to draw it in a stylized manner rather than trying to be realistic. You can see my drawing on the prompt:
It occurred to me that I’d like to be able to draw birds in my usual semi-realistic style. To do that, I’d need to learn more about bird anatomy, and maybe do some studies from real life. I filed the thought away as a fun project for later.
Then I ambled off to do an?unrelated art series, drawing fantasy characters. I had fun, and I was still in the art mood…
Reader, I made 49 sketches of birds in a week. I’m not sure what happened.
The number seems absurd to me now. However, it started simply enough. I collected a number of reference images. The first few were nature photography and anatomical diagrams from the internet, strictly for practice. I won’t be sharing the drawings I made from those.
The next batch of references were freeze-frames from bird videos I took, with the birds mid-flight or in cool action poses.
And then, I pulled up my drawing program and had fun sketching, trying to develop the type of anatomical shorthand I use for cartooning (curved lines and simple shapes to build on). I was having fun, and time flew, and I ended each day with a page of rough sketches.
You can see all my drawings and some notes about the project here:?Teaching Myself to Draw Birds!
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Then I flipped back through my digital drawing pages to count my sketches. Including the practice ones, I counted about 49, and was surprised. If I’d set out to do that many, I’d have been daunted.
Larger chunks of the drawings were done in the early days since I was racing through sketches as I worked hard on learning the anatomy. I didn’t polish them up since I wasn’t going to share them.
Toward the end, I was working from my own photos and liking the results. So I made fewer and spent more time on shading and cleaning up stray lines.
I also learned the internet term ‘birb’ for a cute or silly bird.
I believe I’d heard it before, but I looked it up this time when someone used it in response to my drawings.
The Audobon Society helpfully?explains?‘birbness’ to us:
First, let’s consider the canonized usages. The subreddit?r/birbs?defines a birb as any bird that’s “being funny, cute, or silly in some way.”?Urban Dictionaryhas a more varied set of definitions, many of which allude to a generalized smallness. A video on the?youtube channel Lucidchart?offers its own expansive suggestions: All birds are birbs, a chunky bird is a borb, and a fluffed-up bird is a floof. Yet some tension remains: How can all birds be birbs if smallness or cuteness are in the equation? Clearly some birds get more recognition for an innate birbness.
So, I learned something new, and not just a drawing skill.
The July challenge kicked off a flurry of art I did not expect! Thank you?
?for starting it all.Here’s my worksheet resource for having a deeply creative work session!