12 Realistic Bird Drawing Ideas

This collection of 12 realistic bird drawings spans 20 years of my work, from quick sketches to highly detailed photorealistic pencil drawings.

Each piece comes with insights into my drawing process, techniques, and tips to help you improve your own bird art.

If you appreciate traditional hand-drawn art and classic drawing skills, you’ll find this post interesting.

‘Ruffled Feathers’ A Realistic Pencil Drawing of a Cockatoo

This is my realistic pencil drawing of a cockatoo, and my favorite in this collection.

It was a real challenge to get the texture just right. The raised crest, the fluffy feathers, and the sharp beak all needed different techniques to make them look realistic.

I used a full range of tones to bring out the contrast, with the dark background helping the lighter feathers stand out. I used a mix of mechanical pencils and lighter ‘H’ grade Derwent drawing pencils

Feathers like these take time to draw, you have to build them up gradually, working from soft shapes to fine details. The tiny white lines were also a challenge. The trickiest part was keeping the texture looking natural without overworking it.

Draw white lines – Read this: How to Draw White Lines in a Pencil Drawing: Do This…

I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, but as always, there are things I’d do differently next time. I’m a perfectionist and these things are set in stone.

If you’ve ever struggled with drawing white feathers and details on a dark background, I get it, it’s not easy! But with careful shading and patience, you can create the effect of light and texture without relying on outlines.

‘Eagle Eyes’ A Pencil Drawing of a Bald Eagle

This is my pencil drawing of a bald eagle, and I wanted to capture its intensity without overcomplicating the details. The challenge here was balancing the soft, wispy feathers around the head with the dense, layered plumage on the body.

If you’ve ever struggled with drawing dark feathers, I know how frustrating it can be. The key is starting light and building up the depth slowly. It’s the only way to draw convincing sheen and contrast. It takes patience.

The eyes were the most important part, get them wrong, and the whole drawing falls flat. I spent a lot of time making sure they had the right focus and intensity.

The white feathers were also tricky because you can’t just leave them blank; you have to delicately shade them to give them form, without making them look dirty.

‘Chestnut Tree and Tawny’ An Owl Pencil Drawing

This is a pencil drawing of a tawny owl perched on a chestnut coppice, carefully composed to enhance balance and depth. Here, I’ve placed it on a sturdy post amid a cluster of chestnut shoots.

To improve the composition, I made a few adjustments, bunching the main trunks closer together and selectively pruning the foliage to create a more structured, visually interesting arrangement. The branches weave through the scene naturally, framing the owl without overwhelming it.

The final touch was the background shading, which adds subtle movement and contrast, making the owl stand out while keeping the scene soft and atmospheric. The end result is a quiet, contemplative moment, just an owl in its natural setting, watching the world go by.

As an interesting side note, owls are surprisingly collectable. After selling my art prints face-to-face for decades, I noticed that it’s mainly older women who love them.

They’re often bought as gifts for mothers and grandmothers, which makes sense, owls are so often associated with wisdom and matriarchy.

‘Love a Duck’ A Realistic Pencil Drawing of Call Duck

This drawing was all about capturing the water. The Call Duck was a great subject, cute, full of character, and a natural fit for what I thought would be a best-seller.

I came across it in a vineyard duck pond in South Africa, and with so many customers asking for duck drawings, I took that as a clear signal. Seemed like a no-brainer.

I put a huge amount of effort into drawing the water convincingly, making sure the ripples, reflections, and movement looked as real as possible. That part worked.

Read this related post: How to Draw Water in Pencil: Drawing Water Step by Step

But I made life harder for myself by choosing the wrong paper. It was too grainy, which meant I spent far too long trying to smooth out inconsistent tones. It nearly drove me mad.

Despite all that effort, this one never sold as well as I expected. It ticked all the boxes, a cute duck, beautifully drawn water, and even a great title, ‘Love a Duck‘. But for some reason, it didn’t connect with people the way I thought it would.

Just when you think you’ve cracked the code to sales, reality reminds you otherwise. The public is a fickle bunch, and sometimes, you just have to accept that not every piece will be a hit.

‘The Duck Pond’ A Pencil Drawing of a Mallard

This was one of my early attempts at realism, drawn entirely with Derwent drawing pencils on fine grain cartridge paper. I took my own reference photos with an old film camera, nothing fancy, just whatever I had at the time.

Mallards were everywhere, so I didn’t have to go far to find a willing subject. I was heading to Swanbourne Lake near Arundel Castle when I spotted this duck swimming in a roadside ditch. The reflections were perfect, so I took a few shots.

Compositionally, it works reasonably well, although if I drew it today I’d move the duck a fraction to the right.

In my original photo, the duck was looking the ‘wrong’ way, and I knew it would look much better looking into the image, in other words, facing left. So, I flipped it.

That sounds simple, but it meant adjusting the shadows and reflections to match the new direction. If I got that wrong, the whole piece would look odd.

Looking back, the biggest mistake I made was pressing too hard with soft pencils, which left the original drawing with a horrible shiny surface. I didn’t know any better at the time.

Later, I switched to mechanical pencils, which eliminated most of those issues. Despite that, I still like this drawing, it taught me a lot, and it’s a reminder of how much you can do with basic tools and a bit of patience.

‘Flaming Trio’ A Pencil Drawing

This drawing is all about balance and simplicity. I wanted to strip everything down to just three flamingos, carefully selected from a flock.

These birds weren’t actually standing together like this, I cherry-picked three different poses and placed them side by side to create a visually pleasing composition. The idea was to capture their elegant shapes and rhythm without any distractions.

Read This: How to Plan and Compose Your Art: A Beginners Guide

The dark background helps push the birds forward, making their soft, rounded forms stand out. Their long, thin legs create a delicate contrast, adding to the sense of balance.

I paid special attention to their reflections, keeping them subtle but present, just enough to suggest the stillness of the water.

I like how this one turned out,there’s a calmness to it. By isolating these three birds, I think the drawing says more than a busy scene would have done.

‘Paddling Penguins’ An Early Pencil Drawing

I drew ‘Paddling Penguin‘ back in the mid-’90s, and at the time, I still had more of a painter’s mindset. I wasn’t too concerned with adding intricate detail, and as a result, this drawing leans more toward a line drawing than a fully rendered artwork.

Sometimes, less is more—except when it isn’t. In this case, less was just… less. It didn’t quite have the character or finesse to capture the public’s imagination, and as a result, it wasn’t a big seller. Not to worry, my next penguin drawing (below) made up for it.

This idea came from one of my many visits to Singapore Zoo, where they had a viewing tank that let you watch penguins swimming underwater. I stood at eye level with the surface, took a few shots, and pieced this composition together.

The four simplified penguins in the background were added for balance, while the central figure was positioned to create a clear focal point. I had to make a few adjustments to account for the distortions caused by water refraction, but otherwise, it came together fairly easily.

Despite its shortcomings, this drawing does prove one thing, even average work can sell (albeit slowly) if the subject is right.

Read this: Is Your Art Good Enough to Sell? You Need to Know This…

People love penguins, and that means some will buy the artwork purely because of the subject matter. And if they don’t, their friends and family will. It’s a win.

And This: Is Subject Matter in Art Important? Advice From a Pro Artist

‘Push and Shove’ A Best-Selling Pencil Drawing

These are wild African penguins from Boulders Beach in South Africa, a place where the birds are so relaxed around people that you don’t need an expensive camera to get great shots. Your phone will do!

As it turned out, I used two different reference photos to create this drawing, picking the best elements from each to get the perfect pose. The interaction between the two birds was key, I wanted to capture that push-and-shove playfulness without making it look too staged.

One small but important change was opening the eyes of the front penguin. In my reference, they were half-closed, and the whole image felt lifeless. Just that tiny adjustment brought it to life.

This one was a lot of fun to draw. Penguins have so much character, and it’s always rewarding when you can capture a bit of their personality on paper.

The print of this drawing has sold consistantly. It’s the subject and humour combined that people repond to.

Hyacinth Macaws – A Pencil Drawing

This is another early drawing, and looking at it now, it still intrigues me. The composition has a surreal quality, what on earth are these macaws doing?

I took the original reference photos at the entrance to Singapore Zoo, where these Hyacinth Macaws were rolling around on their backs, completely at ease. I’m not sure why they were doing it, but they were obviously healthy and they must have felt incredibly secure to adopt such a vulnerable position.

I used very hard Derwent pencils to capture the fine details in the feathers, pressing so hard that I actually warped the paper. That was a mistake, and I had to mount the drawing onto board afterwards to fix it.

Looking at it now, decades later, I still think it has a certain charm. The birds have so much character. But one thing baffles me, why didn’t I add any shadows? They look like they’re floating in midair. If I were to redraw this today, I’d fix that.

A Barn Owl Pencil Drawing

This drawing is a contrivance. The scene is loosely based on a field next to a railway crossing where I used to live, but I changed almost everything.

Back then, I would take landscape photos and imagine the kind of wildlife that could have been there. In this case, I decided a barn owl might have perched on the branch.

The composition was pieced together, I exaggerated the leaning tree, simplified the background, and added a fence and stile that were never there. The only thing missing was the barn owl. I didn’t have my own reference at the time, so I ‘found‘ one, probably in a magazine.

I kept it simple to match the stylized look of the landscape, but I overlooked one crucial thing – scale. How big is a barn owl? It’s all very well placing it in the scene, but was it proportionally correct? I still don’t know. No one has ever questioned it, so I assume it looks alright.

This is something all wildlife artists face when constructing scenes. If you’re using reference shots for backgrounds, you have to consider whether the subject is to scale and if the foliage is accurate. Enthusiasts will spot any mistakes instantly.

If you ever need to check dimensions in a reference shot, placing an object of a known size in your photo can help.

‘Night Flight’ A Pencil Drawing of a Barn Owl

This drawing of a barn owl in flight came from a reference photo I took during a falconry show at a vineyard in South Africa. But, even with a decent camera, getting a sharp, usable shot of a moving bird was difficult.

The trick, as I quickly learned, was to take as many photos as possible and accept that most of them would be junk. Out of the everything, this one had something to work with, an interesting pose and a great angle, but typically, it was missing the wing tips.

Read This: Is Drawing From Reference Photos Bad? Are You Cheating?

To fix that, I had to do some research. I scoured the internet for flying barn owls, piecing together the missing feathers to complete the composition. That part worked well enough, but the background was another challenge.

I didn’t want to leave it blank, so I tried using cross-hatching to suggest movement. In theory, it was a good idea, but in practice, it felt a bit forced. It did the job, but it wasn’t as loose and natural as I’d hoped.

Later, I went back and filled in the background completely, which looked much better. This version is fine. The darker background really helped the owl stand out and gave the drawing more atmosphere.

‘Song of the Wren’ An Early Drawing

This is one of my earlier sketches, drawn well before I started publishing my work. I was still figuring things out, experimenting with composition and drawing techniques.

The inspiration came from my walks along the Arun Valley in West Sussex, where the old hedgerow trees always caught my eye. I took a few film snapshots for reference, built up the scene with brambles in the foreground, and finished it off by adding the singing wren.

Back then, the digital world wasn’t really a thing, I had to rely on whatever I had available. A basic film camera, a sketchpad, and whatever books or magazines I could get my hands on for ideas.

In truth, the wren wasn’t from my own photo; I found it in a library book, which I wouldn’t do now, but at the time, I didn’t have the kit or the means to take decent bird photos myself. Besides, it was never meant for publication.

Despite its flaws, I still like this drawing.

12 Realistic Bird Drawings and Sketches; Final Thoughts

This post has given you a look at 12 realistic bird drawings, covering a range of styles from simple sketches to highly detailed studies.

You’ve seen how different drawing techniques bring feathers, textures, and characters to life, along with insights into my creative process and the challenges behind each piece of work.

Whether you’re looking for inspiration, tips, or just an appreciation of hand-drawn bird art, I hope you’ve found something useful in this guide.

If you like the way I draw and want to try things for yourself, this is my basic kit

These posts will also interest you:

• How Do Wildlife Artists Make a Living? Copy this and Get Started
• 7 Bird Art Bestsellers: Best Wall Art Selling Guide
• 9 Farm Animal Art Bestsellers: Home Decor That Sells!
• 12 Wildlife Art Bestsellers (Use These Subjects to Make Money)
• How to Sell Your Drawings: 10 Steps to Success
• How to Draw Realistic Shadows in Pencil: Light and Shade
• How to Draw Realistically: 11 Realistic Drawing Tips
• 14 Ways to Make Your Drawings Interesting and Improve

---

---

PIN THIS