Chicken Feet

Unfortunately, my unwilling little model did not want to sit still. She had just taken a dust bath and sent plumes of dirt into the air each time she tried to get away. Her struggling was not very good for her feathers, though they were already very ragged when I caught her. When I finally let her go, she just stood there watching me, like she didn't believe that I was just going to let her go after playing with her for so long. XD

She got to spend more time in the sun, and she was able to eat grass, so she was happy enough afterwards.

Posing her and holding her took both hands, so I was unable to take any photographs.

When I got back inside I started sketching. These are all done from memory, so they will have some inaccuracies (they have fewer than I had expected). I actually think it worked out better to learn from life, play with it in my hands till I understood it, and then sketched from memory. It makes me learn the subject better than if I just look at a photo. I have to play with things before I will really understand them. I have gotten a bad tendency to skip that step recently, and I need to get rid of it.

I am really not happy with how the bottom right sketch turned out, I do not remember that post as well as the others and I was having trouble with the angle and the center of the foot.

The little sketch of a scruffy chicken there is what the hen looked like on her back XD she kept trying to keep her head upright

When I started out these sketches were very small. As I went though, My sketches got progressively larger. Aaaish, need to learn to keep my scale even as I draw. The two feet in the top left corner I individually enlarged so that you would be able to see them as well as the larger drawings.

As a note, the scruffy hen I caught had overly long claws. I may actually have drawn them a little on the short side in a number of these sketches. She has not been able to scratch through rocks much recently to wear them down.

For the sake of clarity, I have not drawn my own hands in these pictures. I had to hold her legs and feet for most of these, especially the one in the top right corner (for which I had to hold her toes together, and hold her "thumb" rotated to that position).