It’s not every day that your drawing subject is alive and feeding right outside your window. Nuthatches easily travel either up or down trees as they feed, but this one surely does appreciate zipping to our feeder for sunflower seeds. He then zips back to the safety of the large yellow birch only yards away. This nuthatch and its companions kept zipping in and out all day.
Yellow birch are extremely rough-textured trees with small curls along the bark. They work great for making quick campfires.
You will need:
- Regular paper
- Card stock
- Pencil
- Black fine-tip marker
- Foam sheet
- Soft-lead pencil colors
- #20 fat brush
- #0 fine round brush
- Acrylic paints
- On regular paper, lightly mark 1” squares. Now lightly sketch your bird, block by block. When you like what you see, trace over your drawing with a fine-tip marker. Then lightly trace this with a pencil onto white card stock.
- Carefully do the eye first with your fine-tip black marker. With a black pencil color, do the head next. Proceed over the back with a blend of indigo blue and some white. Whenever you wish, use paint— dark blue and white. Paint may work more easily to make the shade you want and to make the fine details. Pencil colors provide the undercoating. A mix of gray and white paint is used for belly shading. Add a touch of light reddish-brown.
- Continue on to the wings, filling in the dark areas with black and indigo. Again I used paint and a tiny #0 round brush. I took a white gel pen to accent the wings as shown, but you can also use white paint. The legs use black, along with some gray for highlighting.
- For the tree, place your foam sheet underneath your drawing. Then draw over the bark markings with a fine/medium-tip stylus tool. (This leaves no visible black marks.) With an underhand grip, sweep in layers of black and dark brown, and watch the markings pop out! For the old leaves still hanging on, use a mix of goldenrod, brown, and a bit of black paint. Study the guide drawing for details.
- Using a fat scruffy #20 brush, brush in a background haze using black and dark blue chalking. You can also use stamping inks. They give identical results. Do this step dark enough. (To avoid ugly streaking, always make sure you do the first swiping on scrap paper!)
- Now for the final details and the fun part! With white paint and your finest brush, dab in dots of snow. Watch your picture become a beautiful snowy scene! (Dots of snow have a hidden advantage. They can help cover up flaws that you wish weren’t there!)
