Sketching doves I

Hi friends!

I would like to share with you some stages of this drawing process and also tell you a little bit about it.

First, some technical aspects:
I used a mechanical pencil, 0.5 HB lead, erasers, a blending stump smudger, paper 100g, fine grain of Canson's drawing book.
After sketching the shape of several doves from images I have found on Pinterest, I started outlining the first one on the left side of the sheet.

Since my purpose is to learn how to draw a flying dove, I have sketched different views to get the approach I want to use later.
Here's a close-up of the drawing to show you the lines I drew to define the darkest areas.

At this stage, I have used a blending stump smudger that I made myself. I use it to blend all the lines and make a gradient towards the whitest areas.

I have repeated the previous drawing process several times to get this result.
(This is the mechanical pencil I'm using to draw).

In this close-up, I show you the dark areas that I have made around the whitest areas of the dove so that they stand out even more.
Bottom in the tail, I have left the lines without blurring to show you how I have previously made the hatching.

Here is the drawing, almost finished.
Drawing, in my opinion, is one of the most important tasks because it is a process that aims to learn, to know my subject or model. When I draw I learn to look and I also learn to use my drawing tools, I learn to know the properties of the support I'm using (paper in this case).
Also, when I draw, other projects and new ideas come to my mind.
It's very important not to fall in love with the drawing you have made, sketching and drawing are also to make mistakes and learn from them. Being critical of your own drawing is very important, as well as appreciating what has been done well.
In this drawing, I see some mistakes that I will fix later.
The wings must be longer, the curve that starts from the head and that defines the body is not well achieved, also the tail is very strange, bad designed because the reference image did not have a good resolution in that part so I'll have to look for another image to fix this.
On the other hand, it seems to me that the head is well drawn.

I hope you like my post and that it may be useful.

Have a nice day!