Realistic Bird Drawing Tutorial Pencil Sketch : BLUE JAY

We are adding to our realistic watercolor bird collection and I'm going to do a full drawing for you today. I'm very excited to dive into this requested blue jay. So he's a little wet but I actually love that because you can see a little bit more, oops, you see a little bit more of some of the texture in the feathers and we're going to kind of capture some of that. I'm going to soften it by kind of glancing around at other pictures of blue jays that I'm making sure it's the most accurate but I'm excited to dive in and let's do just that. For supplies I'm going to be using one of my very favorite pencils. This is a clutch pencil so it's a holder and you place the lead inside it but I love that even when my lead is rather small I have a consistent size and weight to the pencil so that's really nice. I only have HB, I believe this is HB, oh you can barely read it. So I only have HB at the moment my preference lately has been a B so but you should be able to see it just fine and I will have kind of for the lighter sketching areas I'll have a graphic overlay so you are able to see it but I'll keep this here on the side and I will have this reference image linked in the description as always. I'm using some of my very favorite watercolor paper and for erasers I just have my kneaded eraser and kind of a basic white eraser. I don't think I'll need anything more detailed than that. We're just getting a good solid contour down so that we're able to apply the watercolor in the next video. So about half of this paper blocked off we're going to just figure out basic shapes a little. Just looking at the shape of his head we've got kind of a triangular shape. I'm starting with an oval and then we'll build off the points there. I know a lot of people who like to use very angular shapes when they're kind of mapping everything out. I find that I get really stiff when I work too angular so keeping everything with ovals initially and then building off from there is um has been more effective for me. Texture here come down wing section here tail is coming here it's coming underneath I might move it up we'll see coming out about here so much thicker stronger than we've had in the past and we'll kind of figure out composition from there. Okay we're going to zoom in and with what we have we're going to start on our more final contour. All right I'm going to start here right at the bridge of the beak if you will so oops except if I I'll get that later and then we're just going to follow our much more texture here we'll pull up a picture in a bit of a dry blue jay just to get a feel of how much texture we should have in here just a little bit of a better feel. I like seeing some of this texture but I don't I just don't know how much would be very accurate. I'm just not sure how much would be accurate for a bird that is not wet. I think this section here right by that nostril is a water droplet so I was starting to drop but I'm going to actually ignore it I think it will just be confusing. Kind of going back over here okay let's start blocking in some of this section you want to have a visitor in a moment well hey there sleepyhead doing okay I'm painting that again oh this is a different bird I know I'm doing so many birds aren't I you can color in here quietly with me if you want I'm recording so we can't chat too much yet all right it's easy to get overwhelmed by these feathers in fact as I started to go I felt a little bit lost so I just mapped it in with a little bit more detail I'll probably go in with a stronger contour later and kind of refine these issues but you just kind of break it down and go one step at a time one shape one section try and keep track so I started with okay we've got this white tip here and tried to place that about where it needs to go and then I just moved down okay let's just match up where the next white tip goes and the shape of it and then this next section was easier because these are a little bit more connected and so it just felt a little less overwhelming so I'm just going to continue to do that breaking things down sometimes I might simplify it especially in this section here where it seems like the feathers are all kind of joining together I'll probably simplify those because they would look a little different if they were dry but I liked the angle you know this profile and some of the back so I wanted to keep this shot might live to regret it but we'll see so down here I'm going to try and capture the curve of this feather how it kind of curls under I think that that's interesting I'd like to play with that he's kind of tucked in there see blue okay and then we've got some texture here that kind of breaks into this that'll be a fun opportunity for some watercolor resist and our feathers tail feathers okay I'm thinking that the feathers will come down here I'd like to look at a different reference image for this one but I'm going to move on so we can kind of fine-tune some of these elements and get this outlined nicely and then we'll find another reference image and study the tail there so I'm going to get these feet drawn in real quick and we'll go from there so now I'm going to take a kneaded eraser oops and I'm just going to lighten everything in here it gets a little fuzzy that way I can go back in with a more solid contour deepen what needs to be deepened and kind of map out where different color sections are going so because I'm going to be painting I'm a little bit less concerned about overall aesthetic how it appears to the viewer I'm really more looking to at this point map out different color blocks so that when I'm painting it's very easy to follow so it's almost like I'm making my own coloring page rather than creating something to hang on the wall I'm just rolling it over here we'll pick up some of that extra graphite and lighten everything I can still see it I don't know if you guys can see it in the screen but I can still see it and I can kind of follow it and it's kind of a map before I create my coloring page so this time I'm actually going to start on our left hand side I'm going to omit this kind of rogue wing right here it just doesn't really make a ton of sense to me and so I am not going to have it in I'm trying to not be very sketchy even though that is my tendency the more in a single line very solid very clean you can be the easier it is when you start painting all right so there's a black section here but then very blue all right it's still going to take a lot of concentration but it's a little bit more mapped out so that when I go to paint it won't be quite as confusing now if you are here for just kind of the blue jay drawing and not really the watercolor this is when I'd start blocking in some of these darker shapes I'm doing it a little bit now again to kind of help me later when I'm working in when I'm working with watercolor but this is when I would start kind of shading things in really filling in some of those colors or some of those values so I've got some of this banding here as well all right so I've got a little bit more detail in here and that will help us with the painting ideally we'll see how that actually comes about okay second one curves hard left right at the tip all right and let's just kind of gently mark out where these stripes are going to go this is just kind of general area might need to be adjusted as we get a little closer some of them run together nicely which I think is what gives us the fun texture so let's move these ones or over this I could redraw this and shift things around but a simple switcheroo is plenty let's study another bird real quick and just see how the feathers behave so that we're able to translate what's going on in our video a little bit better or in our reference image a little bit better so that we're able to communicate that to the viewer so I'm looking here at this tail and I can see that there are some feathers that have the stripes and some that have the white tips and none of them appear to have both so it's looking like stripes might be in the center but let's return to our initial reference image and then go from there and that does look to be what's happening there are well this one might have both but we have some stripies in the center and then the white tips are kind of only on the edge so the kind of the side feathers of the tail the side tail feathers does that make sense so let's draw them accordingly so the white tips will be on the exterior they won't go all the way down I can't see that in the reference image because of both the water and where the birdbath is laying so let's see how we can translate this nicely I'm not going to flare them too much because the other one we looked at wasn't very flared but a little bit because it's pretty maybe the hint of some tucking underneath all right let's get our white section here and then on this side start low and then higher up get kind of our white sections and we'll add add some areas with the stripes and the bands seem to be about the same spot I'm going to vary it ever so slightly with some of them that I want kind of to have the effect of peeking out all right and that is our finished blue jay drawing so there's a lot of detail that you can add to it if you want to have a little bit more realism if like you're just going for a finished drawing but because we want to watercolor this I don't want to add too much detail in there that will just be lost too much graphite in there I do like the idea of kind of going in and shading everything maybe we will do a full drawing of this someday because I mean he's a beautiful beautiful bird but yeah I hope that this was helpful and interesting for you I hope that you are having a wonderful wonderful day and I cannot wait to see you for the painting portion make sure that you're subscribed below so you don't miss that and I'll see you next time happy drawing