Seagulls and Mystery Bird

Today, I started by drawing some seagulls that I saw while I was on vacation at the beach last month. I drew these smaller, which I think helped me keep them quicker and less detailed. I like the like quality of the sketchy black pen over the brush pens

After drawing a couple of seagulls, I knew I wanted to try another kind of bird, so I found a bird I’d photographed while in Disney World last year. I’m not sure what kind of bird this is, but it is so beautiful! I’m glad I rediscovered it on my phone.

For this bird, I did an initial sketch in colored pencil, and then added detail with my ZIG clean color brush pens, microns, and more colored pencils. I used gouache for the background with a few subtle colored pencil details. I still need a lot of work on my backgrounds – they don’t ever seem very cohesive with the subject in the foreground. More work to be done on that!