Learn to Draw in Procreate __ Sketching Birds

Hi, I'm Lisa Bardot, and today we're going to be showing some love to our feathered friends. We're going to be sketching birds in Procreate. In this tutorial, we're going to be drawing upon principles learned in my Foundations of Style video. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend checking it out. And if you're new to Procreate, you can check out my Intro to Procreate tutorial. Today we'll be learning how to simplify and stylize the form and structure of birds with a series of sketches from reference photos. By the end, you'll have the tools you need to sketch nearly any type of bird. Okay, let's pull up our first bird photo. We're going to be simplifying it into very simple shapes, like circles, squares, trapezoids, and triangles. Okay, let's identify the parts of this bird that we can make into shapes. We've got a circle for the body, we'll do the head as a trapezoid, some triangles for the tail, add the legs, beak, and wing, and this is okay. It's not perfect, but it does help me identify some things, like I can see that the body is sectioned off into a head, a body, and a tail. That makes it really obvious when I do these simple shapes. So now instead of shapes, let's try simplifying this into lines. Let's use straight lines and curved lines to make this form. So now I'm going through, kind of using those same sections, doing the body, the tail, and the head, but just doing it with straight and curved lines. Okay, now I think we're starting to have something here. I can see these lines coming back again, the ones around the neck and the tail, and I think the beak is a really important part, so I'm going to try and work that into my next sketch. So for my next sketch, I'm going to create three anchor points. The beak, the neck, and the tail. And then I'm going to use straight lines and curved lines to connect everything. The other thing I'm seeing popped up is this little triangle shape at the top of the tail. I'll add the tail feathers and the other little details like the wing and the feet. Nice. I'm really liking the way that this sketch is going. I think I've really got a system here that I can apply to other reference photos and even to do my own kind of freeform drawing of a bird. Let's go ahead and repeat this process. We'll get rid of all of our sketches and start fresh. So I'm going to draw my three anchor lines, and then I'm also going to draw the same thing off to the side so I can see if I can kind of reproduce this look without actually tracing something. Next, we'll draw the body lines, and I'm taking notice that the top of the chest is kind of puffed out. It's a little bit more bulbous there, so that's something that I'll include in my drawings. And then for the tail, the lines on that triangle sort of follow the lines that the body is going, so I'll make sure to use that too. And then the tail feathers sort of come off the top of that triangle. For the head, I notice that it's a pretty straight-ish line connecting the beak to the body and then a rounded line for the top of the head. I'll add in my beak, and then for the eye, it sort of appears to be coming like straight off behind the beak. And then for the wing, I think it's just learning what a wing shape looks like and just making sure we're putting it in at the right angle. And speaking of angles, we'll add in our legs, which birds have very unique leg shape, I think. They kind of go forward at an angle. And there you have it, our completed rough bird sketch. We're going to go ahead and take these techniques, pull up some other bird photos, and try to apply everything that we've done to these photos, just to see which ways we can manipulate these shapes to create all the different bird forms that there are. Okay, let's pull up another bird photo, and let's use those same techniques to draw a sketch of this bird. And as you can see, everything is holding pretty well. I can use all of those same anchor lines and curved lines to create this bird shape as well. Let's do another one. This one's in a pretty similar pose, so it doesn't veer off too far from the course. And this one is in a different pose, so you can see we've always got our three anchor lines, and just kind of the way that we curve, whether they're curved in or out, we can create these different bird forms. This one is also very unique, he's got kind of a longer head, but as you can see, it's the same thing. He's got like a little wing, little tail. And what's cool about this is as you learn this format, you can kind of use it to create your own fantastical, whatever you want, bird shapes. This guy's really cute, he's really like short and stubby with little wings and a big belly. The more times you do this, the more experience you're going to get drawing this and the better that you'll get at it. Tracing, like I'm doing, is a really good way to learn and to practice, and then you can kind of start to make your own shapes on your own, like I'm doing right here. And this definitely takes a lot more practice. You can kind of see what shapes work, what shapes don't, you know, what is convincing as far as a bird goes. But of course, it's your art, so you can make it whatever you want. Okay, now here's a very unique shape bird, it's the flamingo, and it's not really like the other birds, but we can use those same techniques. We're going to section off the head and the body, and they're just the same except they're going to be connected with this curved line to make the neck. And I'm going to see if I can just kind of repeat that same method for this flamingo on my own without tracing, without a reference, and it holds up pretty well because I know the steps that are needed to make that shape. All right, what else we've got? Okay, this one's a little bit different. He's kind of long and straight for the body, but he's still kind of got that bulbous chest, different shaped beak, shorter tail feathers, but overall pretty similar. Okay, let's talk about flying birds, because it's going to be a little bit different. And I'm just going to kind of draw this and trace over the wings so I can get an idea of the shape. And just looking at that, once I've got it sketched out, it looks like a triangle, like I can really see a strong triangle shape. So I'm going to see in my next flying bird if I can repeat that triangle shape. All right, so let's get the basic forms down, the body, head, and tail. And then there's a triangle, which it looks okay, but let's see if I can break this down into smaller sections to get something that's a little bit more convincing. I can divide the wing in half and get lines that curve up and curve down. And I'm going to try and repeat that on my own off to the side just to see if it looks convincing. And I think that works pretty well. Here's one more bird with wings out. It's facing forward, so it's a little bit different, but we've still got the same sectioned off body, tail, head. And I think finding that middle section of the wing and adding the lines in between really works well. Oh, let's do another one. Here's a swan. He's a lot like the flamingo because he's got that long neck, but you know, same thing again. We'll section the wing off in the center, connect that to the body, and add that kind of triangle shape to the end of the wing. And one more just for fun. His pose is a little bit different than all the other birds, but as you can see, I can use the same techniques to draw him as well. Okay, so now I'm going to try and draw something completely on my own just from my brain. So I'm doing my three anchor lines, filling in the body, the head, the beak, the tail. And I've done this so many times now that it's getting to be easy. I know exactly what shapes to do and how to manipulate them. I can even draw him singing a little song. And I'm going to try one more. This time I'm going to try a flying bird on my own. So I'll use those same kind of forms that I was playing with before for the wings. I know I've got that middle line, and I've got the end of the wing, and I'm just connecting everything together. Looks pretty good. So after you follow these steps and practice, practice, practice, I hope you'll feel a little bit more comfortable drawing birds. From the simple sketch, you can take it and make it as beautiful as you want. That's all I got for you guys today. If you'd like to purchase the brushes that we've used in this video, you can visit bardobrush.com. I would love to see whatever artwork you're creating. If you're posting to Instagram, please use hashtag bardobrush. Happy art making! If you like this video, please subscribe for more awesome tutorials. And check out one of my other videos. Have a great day!