EMP - Colour bird Illustrations

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I have been drawing some initial bird illustrations! I wanted to look at different birds that live around the UK. I also wanted to try and use some colour in my drawings, as I have only used black fine liner and pencil up to this point.

I have it very enjoyable drawing all of these birds, I feel more confident every time I draw a new one. I must be getting used to drawing the features of a bird. The medium I have used with this set of drawings is coloured pencil, I am usually a bit shy to colour until I get to the edit on the laptop. I wanted to try out of I wanted colour on my birds initially before the upload? 

Here are the birds; I made sure I illustrated a selection of birds:

See the full gallery on Posterous

I felt like this exercise was very beneficial as I did get to see my birds in full colour. I think I may leave these birds as experiments as I do not wish for this style in my book. I have learnt from this exercise is that I am looking for my book to have a limited colour palette and strong line, as these drawings are too life like. When I look at these illustrations it feels like I am going back to how the typical books you would buy from wild life stores. I feel like this may be taking the wrong route, as I am trying to attract a new audience! I want my illustrations to be approachable in a new way, so I am going to leave this idea of detailed / accurate colourations of the birds behind.