“At the end of the drawing they’ll say, ‘My bird looks wrong’,” says Laws. At this stage-and this is critical-double-check your work. The result should be something vaguely resembling Frosty the Snowman. Where is the head relative to the body, and what size are the two? Using the initial line you drew as a guide, block in the proportions with circular shapes. First, before anything, notice the bird’s posture-is it looking up? Head down?-and draw a simple line, like an axis, suggestive of that position. To get started, he instead suggests three basic steps. But that’s not the best approach, according to Laws. If tasked with penciling in, say, a blue jay perched on a nearby branch, I probably would have begun by outlining its contours. While I am somewhat artistic, until my course with Laws, I had virtually no experience drawing birds aside from the occasional doodle. “You’re seeing details that have always been there in front of you but you’ve never really been able to focus on,” says Laws. “We have this myth that drawing is a gift,” says Laws, but “it’s a skill that any of us can learn.” What’s more, developing that skill leads to much more than just artwork-it can make you a better birder or naturalist by forcing you to pay close attention to what you’re sketching. They make their print debut this September in his new book, The Laws’ Guide to Drawing Birds (Heyday Books). Now 46, Laws has devised a novel array of tips that may not transform you overnight into the next David Sibley but are easy and rewarding to follow. A family friend turned him on to drawing, a pursuit that became an essential tool-Laws is severely dyslexic and supplements written observations of the natural world with sketches. Raised by an amateur botanist and a birder, Laws learned to love nature at an early age. After a morning crash course on the basics, set in the classroom, Laws has led about a dozen of us adult students into a breezy, sun-streaked April day to try our hands at field sketching. My instructor is John Muir Laws, a California-based artist, naturalist, educator, scientist, and field guide author (he’s related only “by spirit” to the legendary naturalist). I’m enrolled in an avian drawing class at the Point Reyes Birding and Nature Festival.
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