Draw a Robin

I haven’t drawn anything in a long time so this would be a good exercise…. In my mind, Pen and ink is less forgiving and I wanted to focus on being fast and not thinking too much about it. My mindset was really practice vs. trying to produce a final piece of artwork.

I tried a few pens and inks and settled on sepia ink in the hopes of getting an aged look. I used a great reference photo from http://laurameyers.com/ of the American Robin as inspiration.

The pen is just a basic fountain pen using 1 style of point throughout. For paper I am using 140lb press water color paper. I am happy with this first try, in fact, I have had a hard time getting back to this loose of a style now after having done a few more.

Things I liked

I did this in one shot in about 10 min
I was able to vary the line weights enough to just use this one width of pen
I wasn’t thinking too much “draw a feather”, so there’s a good flow overall
The splatter pulls in the background mixing with the texture of the paper

What I didn’t like

I was hoping for a more whimsical and loose style but I feel it came out more like an illustration-than I would have liked.
The Sepia ink came in darker than I expected. I was looking for a washed out brown effect.
His belly could be bigger, I tried to correct it while painting

Let’s add some color…

I just used just 4 colors including white – if white is a color 😉

I haven’t spent much time with water colors so my first challenge was how much paint to use vs. water. The second challenge was how to actually get the colors mixing together “wet in wet”. You can see I had some trouble with this where the yellow meets the orange but now I prefer it this way for this piece.

Overall I’m happy with this and have since ordered a print for myself and someone else ordered it on a pillow – which I really enjoyed seeing!