Nature Turned Mechanical

When I first heard what the topic was for this project I had like no idea what to do. I couldn't think of anything creative enough to turn mechanical. It took me a day or two of looking through so many pictures on Google of the nature turned mechanical projects before I finally came up with the idea of turning a hummingbird mechanical. I had seen a picture of a mechanical penguin that was really cool that inspired me to do a bird of some sort... I just choose a humming bird instead. Before I even started thinking about turning the bird mechanical I looked up a bunch of pictures of different humming birds and practiced drawing them. It took me a while but I finally found a position that I liked. Next I found a picture of a humming bird feeder to add to the composition. Then I started on the final. I drew the hummingbird feeder first... I only really used the basic shape from the picture and then I changed the design on it. This was the only project where I didn't draw everything out first before I added the color. After I finished drawing the hummingbird feeder I added the shading with colored pencils and outlined the design on the hummingbird feeder with pen. Then I moved onto the hummingbird its self. I knew I wanted the beak to be a needle, the wings to look like safety pins, and the tail to look like paper clips, but I had no idea what to make the body look like. Then a light bulb went off in my head...pun intended... to make the body be a light bulb. I decided to just leave the head and just make it look kind of like metal. Now that I decided what I wanted the hummingbird to be made out of, I could start drawing it. While I was working every once in a while I would go back and look at my references to make sure everything looked like it was supposed to. I think for the most part everything looked like it was supposed to. After I finished drawing the hummingbird then I started shading with colored pencil. On the hummingbird feeder I had used regular Crayola colored pencils, but on the hummingbird I used Prismas because there was a metallic color that I wanted to use and they blend better. I didn't add much color to the hummingbird just enough so you could tell where the shadows and highlights are. At first I was just going to leave it but after I looked at it I felt that I should outline the hummingbird in pen, like I had done on the hummingbird feeder. The last thing I did was add the background. I wanted to do it in watercolor. I liked the way it looked more than I thought I would. The colors blended more than I thought it would which added a lot more value to the sky. Overall I kinda liked it in the end, it looked better than I thought it would.