Weekly Art Practice - Week 14

Some of my upcoming animal week themes are based on photos of artwork from my childhood that my mom has been sending me. This week comes from this ink hawk I did when I was 14. Started to get into calligraphy pens and ink in general. Honestly, this is something I don’t cringe at and I think I would struggle to recreate today.

Day 1 - Drawing from imagination

I spent a lot of time drawing birds when I was young, especially birds of prey. They were a big favourite of mine.

Day 2 - Figure sketching

It felt easy enough to get into draw hawks again with a reference. Nearly all my references are red-tailed hawks due to the algorithm.

Day 3 - Reference studies

I think I’ve been rushing my reference studies the last few weeks. I have been feeling very pressed for time, or at least time where I have creative energy. After that blind study video I’m thinking I should prioritise writing down a list of my main takeaways after doing the studies. As I find I’m ending up on day 5 and don’t have a foundation to work up from.

Day 4 - Style studies

There are a fair bit of stylized hawks out there but I did have a hard time finding some that I really liked. This first one feels like a pretty forward flat cartoon style.

Reference: Another one I can only find on Pinterest.

This piece got my attention pretty quickly. It’s way more stylized than anything I do but I like it a lot. The strong empty circles for eyes, the use of pure black in a lot of locations and the many many lines to imply feathers.

Artists, please all put your name in the piece itself so I can find you through the terrible Pinterest pipeline.

Reference: By Evan Lovejoy on Tumble

I put these two together as both are explorations of doing a characterised face for a hawk. These were fun to analyse and see what really comes into play to convey emotion on a face that in reality doesn’t really move much.

Reference: Getting pretty annoyed at how hard it is to hunt down original versions of Pinterest images. This is the only source on a reverse image search.

Reference: This comes from a Chinese book that has this auto-translated title "How to Draw Orcs - From Realistic Orcs to Abstract Orcs-" Comic Introduction.

Day 5 - Drawing from imagination

I was possibly over confident going into this day 5. I felt pretty comfortable with hawks. However I’ve been rushing through the last weeks and I’m unhappy with the product. I’d really like to spend more time on pieces instead of trying to get something out in 20 minutes.

Conclusion

I was happy to spend some time looking at hawks. When I started this week I was going to spend some time pointing out the differences between hawks and falcons but Pinterest is so unreliable that I’m even questioning what I know. Maybe if I do falcons for a future week.

I am starting to re-think my practice approach as I feel like I haven’t been doing it in a very focused way. Feeling more like I’m just forcing myself through the steps and not being conscious of takeaways from each day.