Monthly Archives: May 2019

The course notes specify to “Find a fairly busy scene, with plenty of movement.” – in a rural village, that isn’t a scene which features people, so I chose to draw my bird feeders. I get a lot of sparrows feeding on these and whilst they are hard to capture due to their speed, they return often enough to capture them again in the same positions (or near enough).

My first attempt was a bit messy as I’d drawn the feeders and birds in black ink and they didn’t fit together that well.

I tried again, this time using watercolour for the feeders and black ink for the birds. I drew the birds first in pencil, then used a bold black ink pen to go over them. This didn’t work very well as it lost any sense of movement in the birds from the sketchy lines of my first drawing.

I went back to my sketchy ink lines with a pencil background this time which worked a bit better, although I prefer the watercolour background to the pencil.

Reflection

Drawing fast moving scenes is not easy and I think it would take a lot of practice and skill to make these look good. In my case I think I would need to draw a lot of still images of sparrows in order to know how they look well enough to draw them quickly, either in detail or as simple sketchy lines.