Bald Eagle by Robert A. Sloan
Whether you're creating a design for a traditional crafts project like a quilt or woodburning plaque, or a serious piece of fine art, drawing a bald eagle's head has a few interesting tricks that can make your rendering a lot more realistic!
Instructions
1. First, use your ruler to mark off the finish size of your artwork. Create an area on the page that fits a standard size small or large frame, leaving at least 1/4" around it to mat the artwork.
Sketch or trace your photo reference in outline only. Lightly outline the areas of shadow on the eagle's white head. This is important for establishing three dimensional depth. Don't be embarrassed about tracing. Many professional wildlife artists take their own photo references, then enlarge and trace them with a scanner and printer.
Sketch lightly, or use a hard H range pencil to do the sketch. Be sure to get all the lines where colors are going to change, as if you're preparing to make a "Color by Number" drawing. This is how most professional wildlife artists begin their paintings and drawings.
My scan is a little darkened, but you can see the lines in the image and that's the important thing. With tinted paper, you won't have to draw a background because the paper itself makes a good background. If you use white paper, plan to fill in around the background.
2. If you're using a white background, now is the time to fill in the background first.
Otherwise, begin with the eagle's whitest head feathers, the ones highlighted in your reference. Ignore any feathers that look blue, violet or brown, we'll get to those later. Start with the white highlight on the top of his beak, then start where his head feathers meet his beak.
Press hard at the start of each stroke, then flick the pencil back lifting it as you go in the direction of the feathers. On birds it's important to look closely at the reference and make your strokes go in the direction of the feathers, also to "feather" your strokes slightly by lifting them. Do short overlapping strokes. This will create a soft featherlike texture, which zigzagging across the area to fill it in strongly would not do.
It takes a little longer to draw this way, but the results are great once you get used to realism in wildlife art! This method is best for all smooth, soft feathers that don't show individually. If you can't tell which way feathers in an area go, assume they flow back from the bird's forehead and then down and around the bird's body.
Keep your colored pencils sharpened. A fine point can imply more details as the strokes get heavier or softer than a blunt point, for feather textures a fine point helps a lot.
If the white in your colored pencil set isn't strong enough, consider using a white chalk or white charcoal pencil with it, or wait till you're entirely done and very carefully use a clean white oil pastel to give it a little more brightness. If a feather stroke goes a little out of place, don't worry -- it will either be covered by another stroke or look as if it's disarranged. Extend a little edge of highlighting part of the way down from the head as if backlit, that will help give an impression of bright sunlight.
3. This style of colored pencil drawing doesn't use outlines in the final version. Drawing each area carefully as an area of texture gives much more realism to the finished artwork than if we outlined them at any level after the sketch.
Using yellow, do the tip of the beak and a line across the top beak right above the dark line at the edge. Use it a bit on the under beak where it looks yellow on the reference. Then shade with gold, covering a little more area. Use Peach for the translucent orangy part of the beak, covering it entirely. Keep all these pencils very sharp. Then take Terra Cotta (light reddish brown) and lightly darken the Peach area, shading it the way it is in the photo.
Using a very sharp brown, draw the line at the edge of the upper beak, the nostril and the details around the eagle's eyes. Don't go quite to the eye, there will be a darker brown line right at the edge of the eye outside it.
Use a little gray over the brown in the patch in front of the eye, then lightly touch it here and there with white to lighten it and make it look textured and irregular.
If your colored pencils do not give you the same mixtures that my Derwent Drawing Pencils do, experiment on scraps of the same paper to get the exact colors and values. Every brand of colored pencils has a different formula and proprietary colors, but you can create any color you need with a 24 color set if you blend related colors in layers.
4. The eyes are next. All of these first areas are the places where we need the most detail and realism to have a powerful effect. It's possible to get sketchier the farther away from the head, but all that work on the beak and the work we're about to do on the eye will pay off when this is complete and looks as beautiful and realistic as a photo.
Draw a ring in the eye itself lightly with a sharp white pencil. Then use the yellow lightly over it. Repeat layers until the light yellow matches the photo reference. Be sure to notice if there are darker areas in the eye, and lightly touch them with gold if the lightened yellow is too light. For my photo, this is about half the eye, angled forward and at the top, where the deepest shadows from the fluffy big white eyebrow fall over it. Eagles and hawks have a natural grown-in sunshade that often gives them a very fierce look.
Sharpen your black pencil as fine as you can get it. Carefully put a delicate black line around the outside of the eye, and fill in the pupil. Don't draw hard on the line around the eye, it looks more like a dark brown, so you can go over it with the brown after it's in.
Carefully layering white, gold, yellow, gray and brown, follow the reference precisely. Use a magnifier if you're doing this drawing in a small size and you're not sure of the tiniest details -- you'll be surprised at how much more control it gives you on things like pupils of eyes. Lightly touch dark brown to the corner of the beak under the eye, shading that line darker at the point the beak sections meet. Use a little white over the gold to strengthen the highlight right at the edge of the beak, this is another attention-getter to strengthen the contrast of light and dark areas.
Look carefully at everything you've done on the beak and eye, and burnish lighter or darker or yellower to match the colors and shading carefully. The more layers you use, the richer any colored pencil piece will be. It's okay to go over a small area seven or eight times to get the color exactly right -- it pays off in the focal area of the drawing. Eyes are the window of the soul, and mouths are what draw attention next. So finishing the eye and beak are the most important parts of this drawing to shade perfectly and shape correctly.
5. Sharpen the light dusty violet (Mars Violet in Derwent Drawing Pencils) and do some feather strokes right under the beak where it reflects warm into the shadows on the head. Then burnish over that with White if it's too dark (it is with mine).
Sharpen the lightest blue (Solway Blue) and do the feathers in the shadow area of the head, always keeping your strokes in the direction of the feather clump and only about as long as those short little feathers. Leave some irregularities between them. These feathers sweep to the side from the beak toward the back of the head and curve down, while from under the beak and under that clump next to the beak, they just go down and curve a little, not much.
In the middle of feathered areas, use a rocking motion of your hand to bring the pencil down hardest in the middle of the stroke, feathering away in both directions, rather than starting hard and then feathering off. This takes a little practice but it's the best way to do feathers in rows without creating visible rows where strokes overlap, it's a texturing stroke that's useful on some kinds of fur too.
This stage shows the shadow area filled but not shadowed. Use the light blue to shade right over some of the violet shading, and to do a little shading in the darkest part of the white area.
6. Sculpt the feather clumps in the shadow side of the head with warm light blue, going into the areas that were thinnest in the lightest blue. Then start sketching in the shadows within the shadow with dusty violet, then burnish with very light blue. Then go very lightly with the indigo, just enough to barely touch the paper, and add more shadowing strokes, then burning highlights within the shadow area with white.
Use as many back and forth layers as needed to capture the subtle changes and shapes of feather clumps within the shadow area. The result is a shimmery cool color that ranges between purply-blue and greenish blue, with some shadows and details that aren't very obvious but do add to the overall realism. None of the value contrasts should be very strong within the shadow area, only one step apart in terms of light and dark.
7. Sketch the shapes of the brown feathers loosely with tan, drawing their bottom edges and sides. Overlap them as they look on the photo reference, but it's okay to simplify a bit and put somewhat fewer feathers within your drawing, how exact you get is up to you. This is farther from the main area of interest.
Then fill in the feather shapes with a darker cold brown, (cold is grayer, not redder) and lightly touch in the darkest shadow areas with defining strokes of the darkest brown where feather areas have shadows under them. Either take your time and draw this part as carefully as the rest, or work looser the farther you get from the head and shoulder area.
Peach or Pale Sienna can be used for edging the back feathers, and Brown Ochre for edging the shadowed chest feathers if you're using Derwent Drawing Pencils. Match the color as closely as you can, or do the edges in white and then lightly go over those with brown, using it without a white undersketch if you're using other colored pencils and don't have the lightest brown.
Use Solway Blue/very light blue for the palest edges in the shadow area, the highlight color of the white area carrying down.
This is one of the important realism tricks in drawing eagles and many large birds -- the feathers are dark, but edged in a light color. Most of us would automatically think of doing dark outlines and filling-in, but if you outline with the light color the feathers are really edged in and then fill it, you'll give the impression of a lot more detail and an accurate image that nature lovers will adore.
After establishing the feathers in the brown area, shade over them slightly with brown ochre (gold), chocolate (dark brown) and add touches of black in the deepest shadows. Your eagle will look three dimensional, rounded and realistic!
Tags: shadow area, colored pencils, light blue, within shadow, colored pencil, dark brown, Derwent Drawing