Drawing Killdeer With a Brush

Killdeer. Wash Drawing by Ken Januski.

Killdeer. Wash Drawing by Ken Januski.

I haven't been able to decide on what to use as a more ambitious project, either in print or true watercolor. So I continue with these small wash sketches of birds.

Inevitably the small size means that a slight miscalculation in the placement of the brush and I have a bill or eye that is horribly misshapen or twice as large as it should be. This is of minor importance to me. The goal is to think about the bird in terms of mass and very few lines, to capture the essence if not the detail of the bird with very minimal means. In doing so I hope/believe that I'm internalizing the structure of the birds I sketch. And of course I can't forget the structure because I'm distracted by getting detail correct. There's no way to get it correct when working at this small scale, at least not with a brush, or without a strong dose of masochism.

I do think these have a sense of what Killdeer are really like. I'm sure that eventually I'll move on to something more ambitious.