Here’s a little exercise for you: see if you can draw a male Northern Cardinal entirely from memory. Now, how many times have you seen this bird? Hundreds of times? Thousands? So don’t go peeking at any field guides or out the window at your feeder! To those who complain, “I can’t draw a straight line,” I answer, “There are no straight lines in nature” (heh, heh). Now, this doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. If it winds up looking vaguely like your neighbor’s cat (or your neighbor) that’s fine—who’s going to know? Besides, you can make written notes to complement your sketch, covering features you cannot capture precisely enough to suit your eye.
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Start by using a series of very lightly drawn geometric forms overlapped to assemble the outline of the bird: a circle for the head, small triangles for the bill and crest, an extended oval for the body, and another more flattened one for the tail. Work at getting the shape of the head and bill and the proportions of head, body and tail correct. Then use progressively darker lines to unite these shapes into an outline of the whole. Next, carefully outline that black pattern around the face. This is the tricky part, isn’t it? And this is why I specified a male, by the way. When you think you’ve got it, it’s time for the acid test. Compare it very carefully to the illustration in your favorite field guide and see how well you did. Did you get the pattern of black around the face precisely right? Look closely, and be very strict in your analysis of fine detail.
Well, this little test is much more difficult than it sounds and really quite unfair: it was just intended to demonstrate the inadequacy of a typical visual memory in performing such a task. In the field, a kind of abbreviated pattern-matching process takes place, and so we can recognize a Cardinal instantly with little conscious effort. Unfortunately, attention, and hence memory, is bypassed so quickly that we have little useful detail to call upon when attempting a drawing for the first time. Now if you have drawn the bird before you have already forced yourself to pay much closer attention than is typical, by far. It seems perception is a bit lazy—or perhaps it’s simply overworked—the brain appears to be rather stingy with its resources, and resists answering more than immediate needs unless we compel it otherwise.
For this reason, it is extremely valuable to keep a field journal in which you routinely commit your fleeting avian impressions to memory by making quick sketches on the spot or as soon after your observations as possible. Do this most especially with species that are new to you or puzzling in some way under the particular field conditions you encounter—but start by practicing with birds you know well. Back home, develop your facility at this by copying illustrations from field guides. You can try photographs, but remember the hard task of distilling significant detail is already done for you in the more schematic illustration, so you may want to save photos for later. Try to work from more than one source. I think you will find this technique refines your powers of attention and recall considerably. And of course it’s an excellent way to foster the superior level of concentration that marks the skilled field observer. As I said above, supplement your sketches with succinct notes and draw lots of arrows and so forth to get those difficult field marks just right. Again, don’t fret if your artistic skill doesn’t match your expectations at first—in the words of the artist, “the eye is always ahead of the hand.” As with birding itself, practice is the key. Keep at it and, who knows, you may discover a brand new obsession!
The science behind all this is that the act of drawing takes a visual perception out of unreliable visual memory and puts it into written memory—and anyone who has ever made up a grocery list knows that our powers of recall are thereby much improved. The reasons for this are complex, but it is a general truth that our cognitive powers are not really unitary in nature within the brain, but highly compartmentalized. The memory of a bird’s song, for example, may remain—but its familiarity doesn’t help you name the singer; or, you get an excellent look at the bird but cannot match it to any picture in the field guide. What we do by drawing a picture is to reintegrate our disparate and half-conscious impressions into a coherent, more permanent whole. Different parts of our experience of a particular bird need to be brought together again and again before these skills develop naturally in the field, and drawing your birds is a highly effective way to speed up the process. So get busy and draw that bird!
[Suggested supplies: several good quality drawing pencils, a kneadable gum eraser, a small metal sharpener, and a bound sketch book of about 4x6 with unlined, acid-free paper. You can get all this for less than ten dollars at any well-stocked art store. Many of these stores also stock large format books on how to draw just about anything, including birds, with a wealth of tips & techniques for beginners.]
Author's drawings of Bay-Breasted Warbler, Cape May Warbler, and Western Palm warbler. (Click to enlarge.)
[0]Bay-breasted Warbler: Sketch by Paul DeAnna
[0]Cape May Warbler: Sketch by Paul DeAnna
[0]Western Palm Warbler: Sketch by Paul DeAnna