Thank you Lee Hammond

Came away from this weekend feeling pretty good.  One would almost go as far as saying I felt "up".  We hung a bunch of artwork from our respective families (finally), and, for those of you that heard I was putting the crocus painting in a drawer - have no fear, my husband took a noticeable stand against that.  He insisted I find a frame, and it too is now up in my living room.  It will only stay up until I finish my next exercise and then we will "rotate" the images :)

So...this leads me nicely to my newest work in progress, the owl.  I took the image I found off the net and did some computer work to it.  Mostly removing the background and making the image gray scale. Then I started following Lee Hammond's advice (How to draw pet portraits from photographs) and got out my 1x1 inch grid.

My grid is on a plastic sleeve/page cover so I can see clearly through it and I can also re-use it!  Then I drew another grid on my paper (also 1x1, mostly because I didn't feel the need to enlarge it).  Following the gridlines, I drew the owl.

He's not perfect.  There's absolutely NO shading at this point (okay I did put some in the pupils - it was too creepy to look at zombie owl!).  My purpose was to do a line drawing, outlining the features and dark areas, to get a better grasp on the subject.  Now I get to do the fun part!  What do I want to do with this owl?  Do I just want a portrait like this?  Maybe just the head and neck? Maybe add some conifer branches behind his head?  What about a moon?  Where's the light coming from?  Do I want to change the direction of the eyes (where he's looking)?  Almost anything is possible at this point!  So next I get to do a bunch of thumbnail sketches to decide what I want to do with this guy.