hello and welcome to my channel I'm doing another charcoal drawing and this time I'm going to be drawing a bold Eagle let's start I'm going to use the same materials like the last time so mostly charcoal but I'm going to do a little bit of drawing first with a cin or silky Black Pencil because I want some parts of this sketch to stay in place once I start working with charcoal I don't want to lose some of these shapes because I obtained parts of this initial sketch by tracing because feathers are honestly kind of difficult to draw for me very exhausting um but I will do the best that I can I like the position of the Eagle's Wings here and the reference will be in the description um as for the paper it's the same paper I used the last time Fano sketching paper a little bit thinner but it has a nice tooth and also in comparison to the reference I decided to add some mountains in the background I thought that it would be um I thought that it would be a nice addition to the to the overall scene to the composition now in terms of the composition and what I plan to do with this drawing it's also going to be a vignette just like the Buffalo drawing that means that I'm not going to draw all of the background just a little bit of it and I'm going to fade the edges I'm going to fade the edges of my drawing towards the edges of the paper so I drew a shape of the mountain did a little bit of blending with a brush I did most of the drawing here with a piece of Vine charcoal it's a softt natural charcoal stick and it's easy to blend and move around so here I'm just drawing some suggestions of the Shadow areas or the darker parts of that mountain so the light for me will be coming more from the left side and I'm just blending those uh darker areas in as you can see I don't really have very sharp contrasts I um want a little bit less contrast there in the background the main subject is going to be much more detailed with a lot more contrast and texture here I'm using a poor pencil eraser to erase some parts on the Light Side of the Mountain so that the mountain would appear a little bit more threedimensional and so that the the Light Side would stand out a bit better so I am trying to to achieve a little bit of contrast so that the viewer could discern those shapes in the background but I'm not going to overdo it because I mostly want to focus on the main subject which is going to be the eagle and and now I'm starting to work with a charcoal pencil so I'm going to use coin or charcoal pencils and I already used some Vine charcoal so those are going to be my two main drawing tools and for blending I'm going to use brushes and Toons and even my finger occasionally uh for erasing I already used the c or pencil eraser but I'm also going to use the needed eraser where needed so we have these um rows or layers of feathers and this uh top layer here is the darkest from what I can tell in the reference it's both the darkest in color but it's also uh darker because it's facing away from the light source um and uh when I started drawing the tip of that first feather on the left you can see that I made some smaller interrupted shapes to these are called Bobs I think to give you some IDE idea about the structure of that feather so occasionally I will be drawing even some some of those tiny details of the feathers but most of the time I'm just going to focus on the larger values so this part is darker I'm going to make it darker do a little bit of blending any way that I can and then I'm going to move on to the second row or the second layer of um of feathers here on this wing these are going to appear a little bit lighter so for these I used a little bit of charcoal pencil which is darker then Vine charcoal then after that I used some Vine charcoal and then as I blend you will see that it will be clear that vine that vine charcoal is lighter than the areas which I covered with a charcoal pencil but I plan to use a combination of both so now I'm doing these longer feathers on the tip of the wing and as you can see um here we also have layers of feathers and these feathers are also kind of um spread out a little bit so that you can see some of those Bobs so I'm just putting in some of those darker shapes to show how how these feathers are arranged and once I blend them some of those edges between them will kind of disappear but I'm not too worried about that because even though brushes blend and move the material around they don't uh they don't destroy all of the shapes they don't destroy all of the textures you create so you can see that the shapes that I initially Drew are still discernable and now I can go back back in and refine them I'm going to do that with a cinor silky Black Pencil uh which uh is something in between a charcoal pencil and a colored pencil I suppose because it feels a little bit more like a color pencil but it's a little bit more matte I think so I don't know exactly what it's made of but I just say that it feels like it's something in between a charcoal pencil and a and a colored pencil anyway I find that it's a good tool to use when working with charcoal when I need a little bit more precision and when I need to draw some of the smaller details so now I am doing a little bit of refining on the individual feathers adding some lighter details for example around the edges of this row of the feathers in the middle and uh adding some Shadows between the individual feathers making the whole thing appear a little bit more three-dimensional and making some of these lighter parts of the feathers stand out so I'm adding a little bit of a range of value to the whole thing and a little bit of texture and detail now some parts of this process may be a little bit concerning because um at times it looks a little bit ugly but I can always go over that with blending tools and soften it or maybe add a little bit more Vine charcoal on top and blend that so I can always keep refining it until it gets closer to what I think it's supposed to look like once again I'm not a great fan of drawing feathers uh they're kind of confusing and difficult for me but I always try to simplify and approximate and here in this darker part part of the wing we just have some suggestions of the lighter tips of feathers so I'm going to put those in with um or or the lighter edges of some some of the individual feathers so I'm going to put those in with a pencil eraser this cinor pencil eraser is a soft rubber eraser in a pencil and it can be sharpened just like a pencil maybe not to such a fine tip but fine enough enough that you can draw some of the smaller details I also used to use the uh not the or the tumbo mon0 Eraser but I ran out uh that was also a convenient tool but honestly um ecoin or pencil eraser does more or less the same thing because I found that when it comes to erasing these smaller ships the biggest problem is not so much the size of the mark that you can make but the cleanliness of it because you will often struggle to erase with clean edges and sometimes you can do that sometimes not so much you just have to work with whatever the paper and the drawing gives you and you have to adapt because you won't always be able to have it your way so I'm not too worried about uh not being able to draw every single tiny detail because I'm not trying to draw photo realistic drawings my drawings are just realistic so that means that I will often as I've already mentioned simplify and approximate while trying to achieve a similar effect so I think that now when you look at this Wing I've kind of achieved that effect that you're looking at a bunch of feathers in layers I will refine it a little bit more but I think it looks pretty good so far once I work around the head of the eagle which is going to be the lightest part of its body that contrast is going to make everything look even better so this part of the wing here in the armpit area which is Clos to the body is darker there's a lot more Shadow there so I used a bit more of the charal pencil there also a little bit of a Vine charal because I like to combine them and here I'm refining the tips of the feathers and cleaning up their edges a little bit so now I'm going to start working on the head but first I'm going to try to clean up the edge because I want a very clean Edge to value between the head and the wings clean Edge to value is important when you want to show where one surface ends and the other one begins if there is a clean or sudden transition in value in some cases you won't need a clean Edge some in sometime in some cases you will need a smoother transition so in this case I needed a clean Edge between the head and the wing and and now I drew the eye and um I mostly drew some of these smaller details like the eye the mouth the nostril with a silky Black Pencil and I also did a little bit of light shading with it because the shading is so light the I'm barely making any marks the marks are barely visible so like for example these tiny feathers here around the head and the neck area because only the top part of the head is completely white the rest of it has a little bit of value but um the difference is so subtle that I can't really go in with something much darker like a charcoal pencil the only way I could do it with charcoal is if I loaded the brush with a little bit of charcoal dust and then uh Blended on top of that lower part of the head and the neck area and making it just a little bit darker which is what I did basically but for those smaller marks to imitate the shape of those white feathers I have to use the silky Black Pencil you could also if you don't have a silky C or silky Black Pencil or or any other black colored pencil you could also try using a graphite pencil for some of these smaller or lighter details but you have to be careful because graphite is kind of shiny and um it's a little bit tricky when it comes to combining graphite with um with charcoal but it can be done I mean with a little bit of practice and experience I just find that this cinor silky black pencil goes better with the cinor charcoal pencils as well as with other charcoal pencils so I'm working around the the larger feathers of the other Wing now and the feather will be lighter than the body under them so I'm drawing this darker Edge and I'm going to be making everything uh under that line also darker and I'm doing that now adding some more darker value areas of Darker value which I'm going to blend I'm going to try to push that in with my finger as much as I can and for those smaller areas I'm just going to switch to a tortillion your finger is is the best blending tool when it comes to working with charcoal pastel and other things that need to be smudged but it's only good for larger areas for smaller areas here as you can see I had to use a tum now this top part of the wing has a lot of feathers and several layers of feathers and this is kind of complex because we can't really um um the shapes are different because of the angle of viewing and the force shortening but I'm just going to try to simplify it again I'm going to put some suggestions of those smaller ships using a piece of Vine charcoal and um then I'm going to try to refine those smaller shapes put in those smaller shapes a little bit later but now my first goal was to cover everything with a certain amount of value so that I would get that Wing to be a little bit darker but still lighter than the body uh under it because that's the shadow area or the darkest Shadow area occasionally as you can see I also have to rotate my drawing in order to be able to blend more efficiently and now I'm putting in some smaller shapes to indicate these that there are these layers of feathers um and I'm doing all of this with Vine charcoal now when I'm blending I like to use flat brushes because that flat brush when I point the uh the flat tip of that brush towards the edge it allows me to preserve that edge because clean edges are very important for me uh especially when I'm drawing a detailed subject such as this one so now I'm going back in and using a pencil eraser to Define some of the lighter parts of the feathers a little bit to Define some smaller lighter details on them like the the shafts wherever they are visible the lighter edges or the tips of some of those feathers and things like that but then again these are just suggestions I don't really need to focus on every single detail I don't really need to obsess about every detail in the reference photo I'm just sort of approximating and I'm doing the same thing on the chest area where I created some suggestions of lighter feathers and now I'm moving on to these Talons for these because these are really small details again I switched to uh to the silky Black Pencil I mean I could have done this with a charcoal pencil but I would have to keep sharpening and resharpening it so the tip is really small and so that I'm able to draw these finer details but maybe they would be a little bit too dark in some cases and sometimes I don't want them that dark so that's the leg um now I'm going to work a little bit around the tail area this is going to be a little bit tricky because the tail is white but it's in the shadow so some parts of it will have to be darker others will have to be a little bit lighter because they're exposed to the light source so so that's a little bit tricky because I need to decide how to create the contrast between the tail and the background I'm just doing a little bit more refining on the leg and the talons so that the top part of the leg is a little bit lighter because it's getting some light from above from the light source and then just adding some lighter details on the feathers drawing the talons on the other leg and putting in some details trying to imitate the texture of that skin and then adding adding some of these smaller feathers on the legs the length of the feathers and the size of the feathers varies depending on the part of the body so you always need to take that into account just like when you're drawing furry animals like I did in the last drawing of a buffalo uh I had to pay attention to the length of the f similarly here I have to pay attention to the length and the size of the of the feathers so here I did a little bit of work on that tail uh I made the part of the tail which is facing down a little bit darker because it's in the shadow and I'm going to make the rest of it a little bit lighter so that it stands out against the shadow side of some of those slopes in the background so I used parts of that terrain to create contrast with the with the tail and I'm just doing a little bit of refining on the background as well as the tail area this time using uh totian so these are just some smaller finer details I'm also adding some smaller details to the feathers here on the legs and the drawing is almost done U I'm going to put my signature here on the right side but as I was working on the feathers and as I was cleaning up some of the background I ruined the top part of the wing here because it was all done in Willow charcoal or Vine charcoal and it's erased or smudged very easily so I had to rework it a little bit so I went back in there and I added some more details and some more shapes using that piece of iron charcoal did some blending did some work with a pencil eraser and I think I sort of fixed it I suppose after that I did a little bit of erasing here at the bottom because I wanted the lower part of the mountain to fade even more into the background I didn't want it to be too conspicuous I also did a little bit of refining on the wings added some Flyway feathers ruffled feathers and uh added some darker values on the lower part of the tail so those were just some of the finishing touches and this is what the finished drawing looks like I hope you like it don't forget to check out my other videos and don't forget to 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