I was talking to @marblely about starting to draw my own illustrations to go with the freewrites; think of this as a first attempt, it’s certainly taken an awful lot of work. I’m not sure I’ve spent four hours on it, but for some reason I just can’t seem to manage to make anything simpler at the moment, so in terms of speed, I’m slipping back again. Hahaha.

‘Flightless’ basically refers to anything that cannot fly, but of course it means a little more than that. At least, if you think about it for a moment, I automatically end up thinking of ratites and then the dodo. That poor bird, a bit of an odd one out with a parrot’s beak and the legs of a large chicken – or, actually, more like a ratite or a bird of prey. An interesting animal that cannot fly – and, in fact, didn’t really need to, given that it had few, or rather no, enemies until humans appeared.
And as with everything, when humans appear, nature dies.
Now, of course, you could argue that this bird could also have adapted to the arrival of humans and the animals they brought with them – whether or not these proved disastrous for the bird. But in fact, this bird was perfectly suited to the environment in which it originally lived and thrived; it was able to lead a peaceful life. So you might well ask yourself whether it wasn’t better that it became extinct, because suppose this bird had learnt to fly – perhaps its peaceful nature would then have changed as well. Who knows, it might well have become a bird of prey that attacked humans with aggression, which in itself wouldn’t have been such a far-fetched idea.
In any case, this bird was spared generations of stress.

The Process

I did a sketch with an HB pencil and bought a set of new Bic pens made in France this morning. I don’t know if that’s why these pens, labelled ‘Cristal soft’, smudge so terribly. Perhaps it doesn’t matter all that much in this drawing, but it doesn’t look very nice and, of course, the ink has got on my hands too.

I first outlined the whole drawing lightly in black pen and later added a few more accents, also in black. I added a bit of green to some of the foliage. And although it isn’t very noticeable, I’ve added the water here and there with a few blue lines; that doesn’t really add much value in itself, and I don’t think it makes the whole thing much prettier either.

Issues

The new Bic pens all leak even if used for the first time and at the first stroke. At times they also refuse to draw. So I am back at where I started months ago: the pens refuse to draw.

Materials:

• sketchbook - bamboo paper
• pencil HB
• pens (Bic - Cristal soft) - blue - black - green

_{18.10.26
INKtober prompt: flightless
#artonsteemit #inktober #drawing #freewrite #inktober26 #creative #steemexclusive}