Angry Eyes

I had a tough encounter involving work today.  It was playing on my mind all day and I tried to push it out by sitting down with my sketch book and work on drawing birds. I started drawing birds one day last week and ended up making silhouettes of birds on a wire for my ICAD card, but I wasn't satisfied with what I learned about drawing birds.

Today I printed out an pretty Audubon type colored drawing of bird to use as my model.  First I traced over it, paying attention to little details such as the curve along the back and the placement of the legs under the body. Then I drew the same bird a couple of times without tracing, erasing and redrawing until I thought I had a pretty good facsimile of the bird.  Then I opened another JPEG of a bird in a different pose on my computer and drew that one without tracing.  What I learned from drawing the first bird helped get the shape pretty quickly of the second bird.  I was very happy with what I drew. But...

I was still miffed about my work situation, even after I had a nice lunch with a friend.  When I got home from lunch I pulled out my drawing tools to work on birds again but suddenly an image of angry eyes popped into my head.  I grab a index card and started sketching a close up of my eyes.  I then used watercolor pencils and water to color it.  My eyes didn't turn out looking angry (I don't think!) but I really like how the card turned out.  I even managed to make hair look a little realistically curly. The best part was the process of creating the card soothed my angry soul and I'm just down to a low simmer now!