Sunday Sketching: Blue Jay Study

We’ve been enjoying lots of birds in our backyard. Because it has been such a dry and cold spring, the birds seem to be spending lots of time perched on the birdbath.

All the interest in the little blue birdbath reminded me that I had started a series of watercolor paintings of various creatures that stop here to drink or bath. In particular, I want to make a large-scale painting of an imaginary scene.

In my imagination, a bird and a squirrel are having an argument over which of them gets to drink first. I had done some small sketches and paintings of squirrels. Today I am sketching a blue jay perched here, right about where the cardinal is sitting.

To get started, I turned to David Sibley’s book, What it’s like to be a bird.

What It’s Like to Be a Bird

One of the things I love about this guide is the watercolor paintings, done to scale, of each bird featured. I knew Sibley was a great naturalist and now I know him as a fine illustrator. Turning to his image of blue jays, I traced the life-size head of the blue jay.

Eventually, I ended up scaling it down to about 90% of life size. I then transferred the tracing to my sketchbook. Then I looked at several photographs of the blue jay, some from the internet and some from Bill’s archives. Since I couldn’t find exactly the posture I want to represent, I just took bits and pieces of different images. This could have turned into a disastrous Frankenstein of a drawing, but it didn’t.

This took about an hour and a half, the but the time was well worth it. I learned a lot by studying each part of the bird as I worked on it.

In the future, I will do a few watercolor studies of the jay and also draw a squirrel to this same scale, before combining all the pieces together in one painting.