sketch – Rhubarb & Burble

This illustration was inspired by the Artful box theme: a hoopoe from Saturday 9th January 2021.

Most people are probably familiar with the orange coloured hoopoe with the amazing crown of feathers. I thought I’d find out if there were any other types of hoopoe and discovered the green wood hoopoe. I loved the rich greens and blues in the plumage, so plumped for this as my subject.

I used some of the inks from my Artful Box along with the chinagraph pencil and fineliner pen. Thanks to a very constructive suggestion on my post Illustration inspired by Artful Box: lighthouse, I had subsequently purchased some blue masking fluid and blocked out some areas including the white parts of the tail feathers. This worked really well, and I’m glad I didn’t risk painting around the negative space, because as sure as eggs is eggs, I would have made a mistake! I would highly recommend this product: Set of three Frisk Masking Fluid Brushes with 60ml Blue Masking Fluid (affiliate link). This is the one I purchased and the brushes are very good quality too.

I took a bit of time to map out the proportions of the bird before painting. My favourite part was using the fineliner to define the plumage and tree branches.

Here is a larger image:

You can see my unboxing of the December 2020 – February 2021 Artful Box here:

What do you think? Please comment below.

Louisa

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This illustration was inspired by the Artful box theme: An ibex from Thursday 7th January 2021.

Time was short today after I had a three-hour meeting this morning and then spent some time organising files on my laptop (just the tip of the iceberg!)

I wasn’t ready to attempt an actual animal yet, but I loved the structure of the ibex horn, so sketched this one. This was drawn with F and 8B pencils.

An ibex’s horns appear at birth and continue to grow through the rest of their life. Sometimes older ibex have horns which have spiralled a couple of times. The Asiatic or Siberian ibex tend to have the more prominent ridges on the frontal surface like these.