Inktober day 5 – chicken

I can’t believe it… It’s the second day in a row that I’m pleased with my drawing 🤗🤗. Though I’m not pleased that it no longer looks completely sharp now I’ve put the photo into this post.

There was no way I was going to have another go at a roast chicken, so I trawled the Internet for photos of live chickens. Suddenly I came across this close up and felt really drawn to it. I was planning how I would do it when my husband commented on how much texture there was in the comb. He was saying it was a cool thing but suddenly I lacked confidence in my ability to represent it. Uncharacteristically, as I was about to look for a different picture, I thought “you’ll never know if you could represent it if you don’t have a go at it. And if it looks rubbish you’ll at least learn something from it”.

So I started drawing. I decided to roughly sketch the outline in pencil first so I could make sure I got this in the right place and could concentrate on the texture and detail. Despite that I’ve still got the shape of the back of the comb wrong, but that’s maybe not a problem if you don’t compare it with the original photo.

I actually quite enjoyed stippling today, though I maybe cheated a bit by using a bigger nibbed fine liner pen so I wouldn’t have to do so many dots! Annoyingly, I’ve used the 0.1 nib so much that it’s beginning to run out.

Apparently you’re meant to choose one shading technique so there is continuity in your picture, so I worried that the hatching in the feathers would look odd alongside the stippling of the comb. I’m not sure I could have done it differently though given how different the textures at. What do you think? Any advice?

I’m loving looking at other people’s blogs and seeing what they’ve produced for inktober, and I’m enjoying looking at their shading techniques and trying to learn from them.

Tomorrow’s prompt is drooling 😂. No idea at the moment what I’ll do for that.

Advertisement