Studying Feathers (Part 2)

Continuing with the idea of my previous post, I will briefly cover a few of the methods artists have used to meaningfully portray feathers in their work. Note that I won’t be using any of the original artwork to avoid infringing on copyright — which is a shame, because it muddles the point a bit.

The first several pieces established the most common motif in the rendering of feathers on birds: the use of curved lines to indicate the leading edge of the feathers’ vanes. In the case of the large primaries, these took the forms of full outlines around the feather. The smaller vaned feathers that covered the rest of the bird only had a small portion of their leading edges visible. These curved lines followed various wavy patterns to indicate the almost “stepped” appearance of the birds feather topology.

Aside from these leading edges, the primaries were individually shaded while the other feathers were treated as a mass with little variable shading. Another important thing to notice is that the rachis is not visible.

The technique of shading the leading edges of the feathers also appeared in this style. However, the feathers on the body of the bird — and particularly the coverts on the wing — were portrayed by blocking out sharp, flame-like shapes of darkness that then stepped upward towards bright white in a gradient. The primaries were again treated individually, with basic crosshatching that followed the direction of the barbs of the feather as opposed to arbitrary angles. Again the rachis is not visible in any of the primary feathers.

This style appeared to be the most popular — particularly among drawing tutorials. It also clearly demonstrates what I mean by shading the edges of the feathers. However, in contrast to the previous styles, this shading is accomplished with lines seemingly meant to represent individual barbs as opposed to entire vanes. The birds rendered in this style were shaded according to their own volume, with little consideration of the feathers.

This style breaks the motif. Instead, entire regions of feathers are shaded with flat colors that step up into differently shaped regions. Notice how the feathers look particularly sharp, thick, and again flame-like. The effect could be used to similarly represent long hair or fur. The edges of the bird sport large, wavy wedges of feather to help complete the texture.

Onto individual feathers. This first style consisted of no shading and only used outlines to convey the shape of the feather. The edges appeared to be created by following a basic, whole shape with breaks in the vane only appearing in the outlines around the clusters of barbs. The afterfeather did not have nearly the same amount of complexity as the vane. The basic idea of this style was to use as many tightly configured, curved lines to indicate the barbs as possible.

Not my best work, I will definitely admit, heh.

This style was very similar to the first individual feather style, but differed in how it portrayed the barbs. Instead of using a line for each individual barb, it used lines to separate blocks of barbs.

Finally, a very particular feather. This one had a very basic, rounded shape surround the rachis to indicate the vane. Little cuts were made into this shape to break up the vane. Some of these cuts were shallow while others went all the way to the rachis. Rather than using lines to indicate each of the barbs, this style used crosshatching to hint at their existence all along the edge of the feather. Additionally, crosshatching was used around the edges of the rachis to create a gradient effect on the vane. The afterfeather was drawn as a huge puff, with separate lines to indicate its extent instead of one contiguous outline.

These were only a handful of the numerous styles used by artists to draw feathers and birds. There are more observations to be made by looking at the works of other artists, and I encourage you to do your own studies.

Also, I must apologize for the long gap between this and the previous post. I’ve had a bit of a nightmare schedule at work and am also tackling another project to the side. Regardless, I am hoping to return to a somewhat normal routine of posting soon!