diving back into my sketchbooks with bird studies

18 Jul, 2026

In second grade, I borrowed The Tale of the Two Bad Mice by Beatrix Potter from our library and was utterly enchanted by her darling watercolor animals. Ever since then, I had a deep desire to write and illustrate my own stories; however, even though I had plenty ideas for characters and plots, I did not have a knack for art. I still gravitate toward illustration and animation, including reading a healthy diet of graphic novels, web comics, and picture books.

Every now and then, I get back to an attempt at making art, but give up because I'm intimidated about things looking bad. One of my worst habits is that if I am not okay at doing something right away, I stop engaging with it. Practice feels emotionally painful when I only pay attention to my flaws. So I have a few half-finished sketchbooks hidden away alongside my many, many finished journals.

This new spark of love for birds encouraged me to pull out my sketchbook again. My first attempts were shaky as I tried to break down their complex wings into simpler shapes, but I was having so much fun that I pressed on. After a few days of practice, I even pulled my colored pencils and watercolor palette back out. Now it's become a daily routine to look for references and play with mark making.

Here's a peek into my journey so far.

Admittedly, this was not my first recent attempt, but it is the first that I want to share haha As I mentioned in an earlier post on birding, I love crows and they were a big motivation behind my vested interest in birding. All of these sketches were done using an Indanthrone Blue Faber-Castell Polychromos Colored Pencil.

Unfortunately, I was not good about tracking where my photo references came from at this point - though most were from Pinterest and Instagram. I am going to try and be more diligent about this moving forward!

For this next Northern Mockingbird spread, I wanted to add a color palette with additional pencils (mostly Prismacolor Premier.) My brother liked all of the doodles where the birds looked angry and judgy lol You can see that my wings are still very confused at this stage.¹

My pencil color palette didn't really work for Dark-Eyed Juncos, I'm afraid, but I do quite like the mom and baby drawing on the left side. At this point, I started itching to get back into my watercolor palette because I felt that adding a sheer wash of black would be easier than going straight in with a dark pencil or marker.²

In comparison, I loved the color palette for these Western Bluebirds and started branching out more to add environmental elements. The wings are also starting to look a little less wonky!³

After a rough go at trying to doodle Goldfinch, I felt like I needed some warm-up exercises. I stumbled across The Calm Creative's video "Quick sketching birds! A drawing exercise for beginner artists" and the tip that really helped me was to watch videos and pause to find a range of poses. The first video I watched was a compilation of other people's streams, so I switched to videos uploaded by the original creator including Patsy’s Garden and Birder King.

During my second sketching session, I also practiced drawing some of the squirrel and chipmunk friends that ate from the feeders. It was my first attempt at drawing mammals and it felt good to branch out without growing immediately frustrated with myself. These pigeons are way better than my first attempt at the start of this month.

Lots of woodpeckers and grackles from this stream sketching session. I love how silly and expressive grackles are and want to return to drawing them again soon. By this point, I felt like I was more warmed up with simplifying forms and wanted to experiment with color again.

This is the only spread I have right now in one of my watercolor sketchbooks. This is much toothier than my daily sketchbook so it was fun to see how the colors and textures differ. These were done with a combination of Caran D'ache Neocolor II crayons and M. Graham Watercolors gifted to me by a dear friend, Megan. The left side used a water brush, which was a bit finicky and the right side was done with a Princeton Aqua Elite Brush that had much better control.⁴

After that, I went back to my regular sketchbook to play with color. The left side was a warm-up page of Stellar's Jays and ducks from a King Birder stream. The right is a mix of watercolor, crayon, pencil, and ink. At this point, I feel like I'm developing a simplified style that feels comfortable, but I'm still finding my footing with other elements like branches.⁵

The left is a warmup practice though I can't remember all the birds except the Red-Winged Blackbirds. I felt like it was getting harder to convey the birds without color. The right side are all references from Jocelyn Anderson's photography. It was a good experiment in color mixing to get the closer to the right tones, especially since greys have been particularly difficult for me in the past.⁶

This most recent two-page watercolor spread feels like redemption for my earlier failed American Goldfinch (though I did mess up the tail on the first page, but did my best to save it!) Now I'm feeling more motivated to improve my botanical game so I can get better at flowers, trees, etc.⁷

Thank you for reading! ʕᵔᴥᵔʔ

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#art #birds #sketchbook #watercolor