I’m keeping myself occupied by sketching birds right now and by filming the process for you. Here I have two different sketches of seagulls (a herring gull, to be precise) in pencil and watercolor. I like to keep these sketches quick and less detailed than a full illustration. I have had some fun encounters with seagulls although I don’t live near the sea, they’re intelligent and fast-moving birds who can be quite hazardous to any kind of food you bring (as you surely know). I once had an entire Cornish pasty stolen from my hand by a hungry gull (I even have a photo of this somewhere).
In the sketch above, I had a lot of fun with the contrast and dark shadow under the gull’s face, and I like how you can indicate white by adding just a little bit of light grey. You could also darken the space around the gull to make the contrast stronger. Each of the sketches shown in the video took me around 20 minutes.
Here’s the video:
If you can’t see the video, click here.
Hi Julia – thanks for another great video!
Did you use reference photos, or just sketch from memory?
I used a reference for both!
Just wonderful! thank you, Julia, for a very informative video. I love how you describe the character of the bird as you paint.
I’m just about to start a little series of gull paintings myself. I’ve taken so many photos of them over the years, I love their minimal palette!
Have you seen Jamie Wyeth’s painting of seagulls?
https://bit.ly/2UgRjDH
Thank you very much Grace! These paintings are wonderful and very expressive. Hope you enjoy your painting process. 🙂