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Description
As I'm in the very early stages of learning to draw, I've been taking a free online course available on Udemy (Free Drawing Tutorial - Drawing for Beginners: How to Draw 25 Cartoons Step-by-Step | Udemy). The fifteenth exercise in the course, and the second in the 'High in the Sky' section, was drawing an 'Itty Bitty Bird'.

The first bird I drew was very small due to me not realising just how zoomed-in I was to the canvas, and thus subsequent drawings were sequentially made larger, which although inconvenient at the time, did make for an interesting visual in the finished piece. In total, I drew 19 birds as part of this set, with the first nine (plus No. Eleven) largely being stylistic differences from the tutorial. For the tenth bird, I decided to make the entire animal out of wiggly lines and then coloured with a checkerboard pattern to help it standout, and given this unique visual style, has become one of my favourites.

After drawing No. Eleven, I noticed a small space between the larger birds above No. Ten, and thus challenged myself to draw using the erasure tool whilst keeping within a predefined area. This additional challenge led to the creation of No. Twelve which in hindsight, looks like it has been stylised after ancient drawing techniques often found in caves. Personally, I like this bird, but its relatively small size and the speckled background do make it rather hard to see and it doesn't really fit with the rest of the flock.

For No. Thirteen, I used Krita's mirror tools draw four identical highly detailed (by my standards) birds within a predefined box. It was a little annoying that the box should have been taller to properly accommodate all the animals, but ion terms of the patterns, this is my favourite drawing for this exercise. This was also a very rare instance where attention was put into the design on the main wing, not sure why I didn't decorate more birds with this level of detail though.

The final seven birds were all made whilst following an additional rule to provide an extra challenge, gain a wider range of skills, and give the canvas a wider range of stylistic designs:
- No. Fourteen: Draw using short, quickly made lines, creating a 'scratchy' style.
- No. Fifteen: Draw using a single continuous line (except for the eye).
- No. Sixteen: Draw using ONLY Krita's line tool.
- No. Seventeen: Draw using ONLY Krita's circle tool.
- No. Eighteen: Draw whilst ONLY using one, continuous line with Krita's polyline tool.
- No. Nineteen: Draw an Itty Bitty Bird, but the lines CANNOT touch.
- No. Twenty: Draw using as many different pens/brushes as possible.

Despite not being one of my favourite designs, this was a fun exercise and was the second (after the gnomes) where I really started experimenting with a wider range of styles and techniques. In all drawings, I kept to the same basic body plan as demonstrated in the tutorial, but tried to give as much personal flare as possible, although as my ideas for new challenges begun running low, I started making the birds larger to occupy more of the page. I've always found birds, or more specifically feathers, extremely difficult to draw, and thus was excited to gain more practice, although there's still clearly a long way to go before they start looking anywhere near 'good' (at least in terms of realism) XD.

My personal favourite Itty Bitty Bird is: No. Five.

NB: Bird No. Twenty was initially titled No. Seventeen. I believe this was an error and was actually the final bird I drew, although as this was several weeks ago prior to me noticing, I might be mistaken. This error doesn't really matter, but I wanted to quickly make note of it for the sake of transparency and also explain why the number looks different from the rest .

Description
As I'm in the very early stages of learning to draw, I've been taking a free online course available on Udemy (Free Drawing Tutorial - Drawing for Beginners: How to Draw 25 Cartoons Step-by-Step | Udemy). The fifteenth exercise in the course, and the second in the 'High in the Sky' section, was drawing an 'Itty Bitty Bird'.

The first bird I drew was very small due to me not realising just how zoomed-in I was to the canvas, and thus subsequent drawings were sequentially made larger, which although inconvenient at the time, did make for an interesting visual in the finished piece. In total, I drew 19 birds as part of this set, with the first nine (plus No. Eleven) largely being stylistic differences from the tutorial. For the tenth bird, I decided to make the entire animal out of wiggly lines and then coloured with a checkerboard pattern to help it standout, and given this unique visual style, has become one of my favourites.

After drawing No. Eleven, I noticed a small space between the larger birds above No. Ten, and thus challenged myself to draw using the erasure tool whilst keeping within a predefined area. This additional challenge led to the creation of No. Twelve which in hindsight, looks like it has been stylised after ancient drawing techniques often found in caves. Personally, I like this bird, but its relatively small size and the speckled background do make it rather hard to see and it doesn't really fit with the rest of the flock.

For No. Thirteen, I used Krita's mirror tools draw four identical highly detailed (by my standards) birds within a predefined box. It was a little annoying that the box should have been taller to properly accommodate all the animals, but ion terms of the patterns, this is my favourite drawing for this exercise. This was also a very rare instance where attention was put into the design on the main wing, not sure why I didn't decorate more birds with this level of detail though.

The final seven birds were all made whilst following an additional rule to provide an extra challenge, gain a wider range of skills, and give the canvas a wider range of stylistic designs:
- No. Fourteen: Draw using short, quickly made lines, creating a 'scratchy' style.
- No. Fifteen: Draw using a single continuous line (except for the eye).
- No. Sixteen: Draw using ONLY Krita's line tool.
- No. Seventeen: Draw using ONLY Krita's circle tool.
- No. Eighteen: Draw whilst ONLY using one, continuous line with Krita's polyline tool.
- No. Nineteen: Draw an Itty Bitty Bird, but the lines CANNOT touch.
- No. Twenty: Draw using as many different pens/brushes as possible.

Despite not being one of my favourite designs, this was a fun exercise and was the second (after the gnomes) where I really started experimenting with a wider range of styles and techniques. In all drawings, I kept to the same basic body plan as demonstrated in the tutorial, but tried to give as much personal flare as possible, although as my ideas for new challenges begun running low, I started making the birds larger to occupy more of the page. I've always found birds, or more specifically feathers, extremely difficult to draw, and thus was excited to gain more practice, although there's still clearly a long way to go before they start looking anywhere near 'good' (at least in terms of realism) XD.

My personal favourite Itty Bitty Bird is: No. Five.

NB: Bird No. Twenty was initially titled No. Seventeen. I believe this was an error and was actually the final bird I drew, although as this was several weeks ago prior to me noticing, I might be mistaken. This error doesn't really matter, but I wanted to quickly make note of it for the sake of transparency and also explain why the number looks different from the rest .