Drawing Birds with Colored Pencils

by Kaaren Poole, Prolific Impressions Inc. (Producer)

With Kaaren Poole as teacher, learning to draw colorful birds becomes an enjoyable experience. She reveals the secrets of creating her beautiful, realistic, and richly detailed pictures, showing how she builds them step-by-step, in layers of color. Poole explains her chosen medium (colored pencils) and how to use it, gives tips on bird anatomy, provides color theory basics, and then illustrates her technique with 27 popular avian subjects, including the robin, goldfinch, chickadee, and quail. When you master Poole’s easily-learned method, it’s simple to recreate her lovely projects exactly or to use her ideas to enhance your own work. To finish the at-home course in a quick lesson on pairing colored pencils with watercolor, iridescent inks, and graphite.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Drawing, Ornithology, Crafts

144 pages, Paperback

First published October 7, 2008

Reviews

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

After reading other books on bird and botanical illustration, I was surprised to see some fundamental differences technique and approach here.
Poole sketches from photographs regularly, and encourages tracing, whereas other illustrators show a strong preference for freehand sketching of live (or recently plucked) specimens to capture spontaneous movement and natural essence. Poole's detailed notes on the process of drawing birds seems to be centered around replication of other drawings, rather than sketching in the field.
These and the notes on color theory overlook the important fact that colored pencils with of lighter pigments contain more binding agent than darker ones, and therefore will repel darker colors layered on top. The absence of this working knowledge affects all of the instructions and demonstrations in this book, especially the ones that include white feathers or highlights (she suggests using brown paper so that they will show up, instead of using the proper layering technique).
Although it is useful to observe illustrations of birds in this medium, the instructions are not well-informed.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will definitely check this one out again.

[Ireland Durante · Rating 5 out of 5]

Liked the book I plan to check it out again from the library to use as a guide for my winter scenes coloring book. Also great bird drawings. The only downside is she uses different brands of coloring pencils so unless you have a collection of different pencil brands it can be difficult to achieve the same results.

[Kathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Way harder than it looks.

[Meran · Rating 3 out of 5]

This colored pencil instruction book on how to draw and color birds is pretty well done. The author knows the birds well and has color patches for the palettes used for each bird.