Simple Ways to Draw Stylized Birds

1. Welcome to Class: Hello, I'm Lisa, a freelance illustrator who works on projects for children's books, gifts, and stationary. If you've ever struggled with finding time to sketch or level up your drawing skills, you are not alone. It was what led me to creating these classes, short, bite-size ones that can help you develop your art style and support a fun sketchbook practice. In this class, I will demonstrate several easy drawing exercises that focus on simple ways to illustrate birds using both traditional and digital mediums. You will need basic supplies for this class. A pencil, some colored pencils and ink pen or two, and a sketchbook. If you have an iPad and Procreate, you can follow along with a longer drawing demo. And if you don't work digitally, that's okay. I've included a bird sketch that you can use to print and enjoy. The more you draw, the more comfortable you'll become in your skills and your style will evolve with your creative progress. Are you ready to begin? Then go get some paper and pencils, and let's draw some birds. 2. Part One: Simple Shapes: Before we begin drawing, I want to talk about shapes and how seeing shapes will help in your sketching, especially if you're fearful or intimidated about drawing a particular subject matter. Any object you see can be constructed using a single shape or a combination of them. What shapes can you spot and this little bird, a circle, an oval, a triangle, or a rectangle. They're all, they're put together. They create the foundation for this illustration. If you can train your eye to look more creatively at a subject, it will take any frustration or fear out of your drawing because you'll start to recognize how to simplify that object. 3. Part Two: Sketchy Doodles: Let's start things off with a warm-up and sketching a few quick birds. All you need for this as a sketchbook or some paper and colored pencils and a few ink pens. If you don't have this at hand, don't worry, you can use something at home. It doesn't need to be overly complicated. Draw a large C and then a small seed to start. Picking one of your colored pencils. You're going to start at the top of that larger C and draw a line down and then connect it to the bottom. This is going to be the body of our bird. He's in profile, so I'm shading them in here and coloring how you normally would, whether it's little neat. Lines are some cross hatching are messy shading, It's your sketch book, your paper, you do whatever you like here. When I'm working with colored pencils, I do like to layer up my color, so I'm grabbing this magenta violet color and just going in and shading a little bit more for some depth. And now I'm going to grab, not, not this one, I have another one. I'm going to grab this mustard color and just draw two little sticks for his legs and a triangle for his beak. With the ink pen. I'm now going to go in and just add a little dot I and a W shaped wing on the side. And then just cleaning it up here and adding some detail. Now we're gonna move on to the small letter c. And with the ink pen or marker, you're just going to close that up and it's filled out to be a little bit of a wonky oval. But that's okay. This is a doodle. Don't get too caught up on how perfect you think your shape looks. A little triangle, beak in two dot, eyes to stick legs will do like little slivers on the edge for our bird and a bit of fluff on his head. Now, one more C, just dry your C again with a colored pencil. And because we have a bird looking to the left and a bird facing us, I think this bird will be looking up to the sky. Enclose that C again, and make two little upside down hearts for wings. And a bit of a triangle like an open triangle shape for the tail. Just go in and color in that form. So it has some shape and substance. Only use the one pencil this time. Sometimes it's fun just to sit and sketch like this and hear the scratch of the pencil against the paper. And picking up that mustard color again, I'm drawing another triangle at the top for his beak. And grabbing the ink pen, too little dot eyes. We'll finish this off. And there you have it. Some fun sketchy bird doodles that you can do to get those creative juices flowing. 4. Part Three: Teardrop Bird Demo: I will demonstrate for you how to create a cute little bird out of a basic teardrop design. I will show you how to do this in procreate. This is one of the little birds I worked on earlier. To start with a rough sketch, I have an eight by eight page Open in Procreate and just my favorite sketching pencil. And I just go in and I lightly sketch out that teardrop shape. This is just the rough. I'm only using it as a guide so you don't have to worry about being overly precious or meet with it. The little bird will be looking up. So I have the triangle beak pointing towards the top corner of the page. And now I just want to make sure even though it's simplified, that there's a basic structure to his position and eyeline where his feet would go. Yeah, that looked wrong. Needed to change that because he's going looking up at an angle. So that back leg would be a little bit smaller. And working out the tail feathers here. And again, if his face is pointing up, this little tail feathers would probably be pointing down. So now you have this nice line that goes from the top of the beak down to the base of the tail. When I'm done with the sketch and happy with it, I set that to multiply and lower the opacity. And then everything goes under it. That way I don't lose those guidelines. This will be the body of our bird. And I'm going to pick a pretty blue. I've noticed a lot. I tend to draw blue and brown birds, I think, because those are the ones I so often see outside my window. Little blue birds and sparrows. For the body, we'll just draw a line that goes around that shape, that outer shape. I plan to just drag and drop with this larger shape. So I wanna make sure that those lines are connected. Otherwise it will just fill my page and I don't want that. And adjusting the threshold, you can do that by just keeping your pencil on the screen and dragging left to right. For those few spots that it doesn't fill in nicely. I just go back and neaten them up. For the tail. I wanted a lighter blue for contrast. And this is just a simple triangle that I fill in by hand. And for the fun part, I love adding texture. So you go ahead. If you don't have a texture brush that you use, if you go in the drawing folder on Procreate for their brushes, there's a few there that would work fine. And then using that blue of the tail, that light blue, That's what I use for the top of the bird. And then they'll go for a deeper blue for the base. Nice definition that's happening there. And then I sample the original blue, lower the opacity and increase the size of my brush. And I go in and just lightly blend between the two. That way, I just think it has a more cohesive look to the art. Blends so nicely together. And now we'll work on the beak and the legs. I'm going to pretty golden yellow color and go back to my pencil brush. Another triangle for the beak. And similar to the warm-up, I do like to sketch in areas by hand. So that way it just looks more traditionally done and I like when the paper shines through and spots. So we tend to limit how much I drag and drop just to keep more of a hand made quality to the illustration. And we're going to do another clipping layer here. With a darker yellow to add a little more depth to that beak will do that to the legs as well. You can always adjust the opacity until you get it just where you like it. I like to pinch my layers together when I'm happy with them. And now we'll add a layer for the wing. I'm gonna go with a deeper blue for this. Just going to make an almond shaped, like a squished almond shape, almost a clipping mass. So now we can add some details on the top of that wing with that lighter blue. Again, I'll just go in and draw those w squiggles and a few lines that illustrate the details of a bird wing. Simple, not overdone. And again, you can adjust the opacity if you want it to be a little more subtle. I love adding almost all of my character. Dot eyes are dark brown. I don't know why that is. I just like how that looks. So cute. And now I go in, I don't delete my sketch layer. Instead, I lightly erase some of the lines that I find a little distracting or that might be muddied up the color. And I leave others, I feel that it, it just makes it look like a more traditionally done illustration. If you see those lines, the sketch lines, they will add a nice energy to the artwork. I'm going to add a detail layer to the top of this bird. And this is where I just go in. I'll kind of bounce around the art, sample some colors, little fluffy whiskeys on his head. You could do some extra shading in here. You could add patterns or designs to the bird if you wanted it to have more of like a folk art feel. If you're working on a layer, a detail layer, it's or even a clipping mask layer. This way, it, It's non-destructive. So you can kind of play around with the freedom of, well, if you don't like it, you can undo it or delete the layer and start over. Which is, it's very freeing to work this way knowing that you have that capability of undo, like I just did. The fun part. It's like frosting a cake with lots of fun tips and decorations. And when I have a character on a white page in a spot illustration like this, I do like to add a shadow. Just grounds the character to the page and doesn't make him look like he's just floating out there. For my shadows, I sample colors that are already in the illustration and use just a simple noise brush. Go in on that layer and just softly, very lightly paint in a shape. This is just another squished oval. Extend it out too. If you think about the mass of the bird, how far that would extend under him. And sampling another blue, I'll pick a few different colors. I never go with just a flat color when I'm working on a shadow, I like to mix several from the artwork and I feel it just unites things so nicely. It's subtle, but I think it's those subtle details that add the most character and those finishing touches that are so special. And then I'm sampling white just from the background to smooth out and have just a very soft edge to that shadow. And adjust the opacity. It's just there, It's just a hint to say it's there, but it grounds him on the space. And with that same noise brush you can go in and just soften the edges of your bird. Add some highlights. 5. Class Project: For the class project, I've included a sketch sheet download that you can find in the resource section, there are three spaces that you can practice. Some more drawings. I hope you'll share it with the class. Always remember to make some time for creative play and don't be afraid to use both traditional and digital methods. Thank you so much for taking this class with me and I hope you guys had fun. If you want to connect, you can find me on Instagram or you can sign up to be part of my creative crew on my website that be creating.