This week, for the New York Times summer birding project, we invite birders of all experience levels to try their hand at drawing a bird. You can do it from life or from a photo. Try to do at least one sketch in the coming week using any medium you like. Share it with us by emailing birds@nytimes.com.
You don’t have to spend a lot of time honing your illustration (unless you want to). As master illustrator David Sibley, of the widely popular Sibley field guide, describes in the interview below, the most important aspect of drawing a bird may be how it changes what you see.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Do you have any formal illustration training?
No, I’m self-taught.
I must say that I don’t really consider myself an artist so much as a scientific illustrator. I’m trying to convey information, and it’s about the details of the bird: the shape, the posture, the colors, the patterns. The plot is the most important part; if that’s right, everything else falls into place, and it’s like a coloring book.
How often, and where, do you go birding?
I’m lucky now to live somewhere where I can go out and walk in the woods or around some fields and go birding right here. But I was always aware of birds. I listen and watch from the window or the road — wherever I am, I’m always birding.
Do you think technology will change the description of the birding world?
I wondered about that. apparently not. An illustration provides more than a picture. In an illustration, I can create a typical bird, a typical bird of a species in the exact pose I want, and create an image of a similar species in the exact same pose so that all the differences are apparent. And I control the lighting and the color. You just can’t get that in photographs; Photographs are always a record of an individual bird at a moment in time.
One of my concerns is that the skill of illustration might be lost, that the motivation for someone to take the time to learn a subject like this, to make illustrations — there might not be the same kind of incentive to do that. There is a real, deep, personal satisfaction and reward for taking the time to really watch a bird and study it and learn how to draw it.
How has spending so much time describing birds and meditating on them shaped your understanding of the natural world and birds?
It really shaped the way I think about everything. Drawing is a way of slowing down to take time to look at something, and drawing also gives you a record of what you think you saw. It’s not like a photograph; it is your interpretation of what you see.
Getting better at drawing is partly about developing technical skill, but it’s more about knowing the subject matter. Your drawing becomes a record of your understanding of that bird at that moment. Drawing that way encourages you to be a more thoughtful observer.