Sketching a great horned owl, step-by-step

It's probably safe to say that the owl is my favourite animal.

The great horned owl, in particular, is one of the most iconic of these birds. The two little tufts of feathers on its head are so cute, it's easy to forget that these birds are fearsome predators in nature. Anyway, I absolutely adore this bird, so I decided to do another sketch! Last time, I drew a peregrine falcon.

Here is the reference picture I used, just from searching up the great horned owl on Google Images:

What an absolutely gorgeous bird. I began, as usual, with an outline of the shape of the owl. The key parts I tried to capture were the shapes of the eyes, beak, and head tufts.

Here, I tried to mark the locations of major feather patterns. There are circular rings around the eyes, a v-shape in between them, and some fluff along the lower edge of the beak. I planned to draw the shapes on the chest without outlining them, but I marked the boundary of where they began so I could see if the image was approximately proportionally correct.

I started to shade in the dark colored feathers, pupils, and beak. The great horned owl's feathers help it to camouflage among the trees, so there's a lot of variation in colour and pattern on just a single feather. I can't portray all of these colours in greyscale with just a pencil, so I tried to focus on shading in the darkest colours only.

The direction that the feathers grow in also had to be observed carefully. They grow outwards from the center of the face, so I matched my pencil strokes to this.

The feathers directly below the beak are pointing outwards, so from our perspective they appear to be flattened and scale-like. The shapes of these feathers greatly help to add to the 3-dimensional effect of the image, so I took care in trying to draw them as accurately as I could.

The forehead of the owl. The pattern here is very complicated, so rather than trying to replicate it exactly, I drew little squiggles, keeping in mind only the roundedness of the head as I worked-- namely, that the squiggles at the top had to be closer together than the squiggles in the middle.

I also more or less completed the head tufts at this stage. These were relatively simple to draw just by focusing on the scale-like shapes of the feathers, working from the inner part outwards. Keeping the pencil strokes in the same direction that the feathers are growing in helped, and I had to erase some of the guidelines I drew earlier as I went along.

I began working on the chest feathers. These are large and loosely overlapping. The main things I focused on were the overall shape of each darkened section, and the direction of the pencil strokes. I'm right-handed, so I worked from the left side to the right side to minimize smudging. I also added more details along the left side of the head.

Continuing to work on the chest. I had been dreading doing this part of the drawing, but it was actually a lot easier compared to the chest of the peregrine falcon. Part of the reason for that is the size of the image, I think. This is a lot larger, so the details are easier to draw.

I darkened the eyes, beak, and head tufts after completing the chest and the right side of the head. I also went over the entire outer edge of the bird one more time. I think the darkened parts really stand out nicely. The completed image:

In the end, it took about as much work as I'd anticipated, which is to say... a considerable amount. The major thing I got from today's sketching practice, though, was how important the direction of my pencil strokes is. I had to erase certain parts, especially the concentric patterns around the eyes, and do them over because I realized I wasn't drawing the feathers in the correct direction. It really took a lot of concentration and observation to notice where the directions were changing, as well.

The paper size I worked on was just a plain sheet of printer paper, so I could easily rotate the page as I went along to make drawing the strokes in certain directions easier, but I think in the future I might like to do larger sketches.

Anyway, thanks for checking out my artwork! Thoughts and comments are welcome!

~Mel.