Chickadee Pencil Drawing.

I've decided to scale down my photography and later this year I plan on selling my 500mm lens I use for bird photography. I'm 59 and every year it gets harder and harder to drag that heavy gear around. What I want to do is spend more time drawing and eventually try some watercolors. This is something I've wanted to do my entire life but for one reason or another I've never seriously pursued it. I also didn't think I could draw but I now believe anyone can if one has the desire and puts the effort into it. Most of us won't turn out to be great artists but we will be able to turn out an acceptable piece of art that we can be proud of. This is my first serious pencil drawing and I'm ecstatic it actually looks like a chickadee!

To get a better idea of the different gradations of tones I printed this photo in black and white. I sketched in the chickadee with an HB pencil and then used progressively softer leads for the darker areas of the bird, with a 4B being the darkest. The HB was also used for very light areas of the drawing. A tortillian, which is a paper stump used for blending, was also used but I kept this to a minimum to retain the feather detail.

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