Ok its not Thanksgiving yet, but tis the season blah blah blah...
All my past colored pencil birds have been relatively small pieces. my biggest is 12.5"x16" so I wanted to do a bigger piece for a change. This piece is 19"x25" almost double of anything I have done yet. A bigger canvas means that I can put more detail into the piece but it also means that It will be more work. This piece took four days, I usually try to finish a piece in a day but I think that since I walked away from it and came back several times I was able to enhance it, I will try to do this more in the future.
Original sketch with pencil on Newsprint. All my past Colored Pencil Birds (im just gonna say CPBs now...) have been directly from a single reference picture, like my eagle 'Freedom' I found the original on a cover of National Geographic and then free-hand sketched a slightly larger version on newsprint before transferring that to black paper. But this one is my first piece to be a completely original piece, I used four pictures of turkeys to reference the anatomy but everything about it is 100% original. Im really amazed by how terrible this sketch looks compared to the final, several of my other CPBs looked almost just as good when in the sketch stage but all the same there you go.
I had a hard time transferring the original sketch to the black paper since the carbon copy paper I use comes up black, and on black paper that is tough to see. In the end I had to just re-sketch with a pencil on the black paper.
Here is a Close up of the tail feathers.
Close up of the Head, I love the texture I was able to get on neck
And here is the final, I am looking to start selling some prints and originals, If you know anyone who is interested let me know.
I love how the main colors on a turkey our our nations colors, Red, White, and Blue and the rest is brown like a flagpole (maybe im thinking too much...)
Is there a bird you would like me to do? leave me a comment saying what you want to see.
