27 August 07
Birds in Flight I: American Crow
It’s hard to draw birds while they’re flying: there’s the problem, usually, of foreshortening, and you have to get the relative angle of the wings to the body right, and worst of all, the birds are on the move, so you don’t get very long to resolve the first two issues.
A bird I see a lot is the American crow. We live on the edge of a field where they feed; we live on the flight path to and from their roost site in Davis; I see them often from my window at work. A challenge is always to get the correct amount of tapering in the wing as it joins the body, the slightly spread primaries. The “hunchback” look of a crow as it flies.
Last night while we were at a baseball game a partial albinistic crow flew over. The tips of the wings were sliver, making it look a bit like a jackdaw gone wrong. I sketched it quickly in ballpoint on the scorecard I was using, but missed the opportunity to sketch a huge flyover of crows on their way to roost…
Previous: White-faced Ibis Next: Wild Turkey
I can see I’m going to learn a lot from this sketchblog about bird ID by shape, rather than relying on colour or feather details. So crows are hunchbacks, huh?
Great idea, hope you have the time to keep it up!
Richard — it’s not hard to sketch a bird a day, but I may not always have time to scan the sketch and post it — am hoping, though, to get 365 sketches in a year, not always a different species, but as much as that’s possible…
I need frames of
crow in flight