Hello! Welcome to the latest update of Arielle's Audubon Scientific Illustration Blog!
For my progress as of today and through this week, I have been slowly working on adding the fine details to my hawk. Last week, I had outlined the overall shape of the bird, and I have progressively tweaked and modified it since then. My primary goal of Friday's time slot was to finish sketching out the shapes of each of the polygon-like feather splotches. Originally, I was just going to use my fine embossing tool without sketching it out first, but I decided it would be less risky and more precise to scale if I lightly, with a 4H graphite pencil, sketched out the shapes of each part first.
I then erased these sketches and then used the fine embossing tool to leave very small white lines, which without the tool could be very challenging because the lines are so small. The embossing tool helped me create a 3D effect with the white feathers on the wings of the bird.
My experience drawing the polygon shapes of the feathers was a lot more painstaking than I initially thought. It took me hours across multiple days to get the shapes down. I also created outlines of the brown feathers on the hawk's chest.
I also worked on picking out the brown colors I will be using for this illustration. For example, I determined the colors I will use for the brown streaks in the hawk's chest and the dark brown feathers on the bottom of its wings. A picture of the colors I used for this portion of the hawk is below. These were my base colors, however, as I colored up from the bottom, I mixed in various shades of brown.
As Swan (2010) suggests for botanical illustration, I shaded in the darker portions of the pine tree branch with a gray colored pencil. I then progressively shaded from darker tones to lighter tones with gray and brown colored pencils. I did this especially for the pine tree branches as part of the branch had sunlight shining on them, while other parts did not.
This week I also worked on writing my scientific report on the red shouldered hawk. Throughout the Spring Break, this blog post will be updated with my progress on this illustration as I will be working on it throughout the week.
update 3/9:
Unfortunately, I got an small stain on my drawing and I had to think quickly about the best approach for dealing with it. Rather than experimenting with different techniques to remove the stain, I decided it best to simply illustrate the pine tree the hawk was resting upon. I used gray and brown colored pencils to create the pine tree and I added some pine needles on the top left corner using Prismacolor colored pencils. I also worked on coloring the head of the hawk.
update 3/10:
My goal for today's art session was to blend and shade. Before doing so however, I made some of the white spots on the hawk's wings smaller. They were way too large. I then took my white Prismacolor colored pencil and blended the feathers of the hawk. This allowed the colors to be much more smooth on the paper. I then used a Q-tip (another Swan suggestion) to help remove excess wax off the paper.
(564 words)
Works Cited
Swan, Ann. Botanical Portraits with Colored Pencils. B.E.S. Publishing, 2010.
Scientific Information:
In this piece, I illustrated a red-shouldered hawk, or rather, Buteo lineatus, found perching on top of a slash pine tree in the Abacoa Greenway. I render a juvenile hawk, approximately one years old, as deduced by its smaller size and color feathers on its chest. The typical habitat of a red-shouldered hawk includes bottomland woods, wooded streamsides, swamps. On the US East Coast, they nest in deciduous and mixed forest (with large trees and open understory). During the winter, they may move to more open habitats. In Florida, these hawks are often found in pine woods and mangroves (Kaufman).
Red-shouldered hawks breed from the eastern and northeastern US all the way to southern Canada. Populations that reside in the east and west are generally resident, but those that nest in the northeastern US and Canada migrate south for the winter. Typically, there are anywhere from two to four eggs (Kaufman). The male will bring food to the nest and the female feeds it to the nestlings for several weeks after they are born (Kaufman). There are five subspecies of red-shouldered hawks; the subspecies in Florida has a lighter appearance and paler markings than other subspecies of red-shouldered hawks (American Bird Conservancy).
Red-shouldered hawks are not endangered; in fact, their population is rising. They are designated as least concern by the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species.
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Works Cited
American Bird Conservancy. "Red-shouldered Hawk." American Bird Conservancy, 16 Jan. 2020, www.abcbirds.org/bird/red-shouldered-hawk/.
IUCN. "The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species." IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, www.iucnredlist.org/species/22695883/93531542#threats.
Kaufman, Kenn. "Red-shouldered Hawk." Audubon, 20 Oct. 2021, www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/red-shouldered-hawk.
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