Fateful Flight - Dove and Sieara

Illustrating the scene when little 8-year-old Dove first holds her companion, Sieara... The newly-fledged bird (who was still learning how to steer) zipped into the room, tried to stop on a shelf and missed, and crashed sideways against the headboard, fracturing her wing on impact.

It was the first time Dove had ever been able to handle another living creature, and between empathically feeling the pain of a broken wing and not understanding what was happening, she was pretty scared... but more concerned, because she knew the bird was hurt and she wanted to help.

So concerned, in fact, that as her mother splinted and wrapped the wing, she begged Alerina to let her keep the bird and watch over her, to make sure she was really okay.

Luckily Dove's grandfather was a bit of a healer and had taught his wife, who taught Dove's mother, how to care for injured birds, and it wasn't very long before the wing was healed and Dove was too attached to let her mother put her outside. As she'd healed, she'd grown accustomed to, and even enjoyed, Dove's company~

Dove and Sieara became inseparable.

~*~


Drawn March 3, 2012; it took maybe 60-90 minutes.

During which time I repeatedly surprised myself by the epic failure at drawing a bird. (I confused myself by attempting to proportion a Eurasian-collared-dove-sized bird against an eight-year-old child, and I have absolutely no references, websites, or people I can go off for that. 8F )

I tried to illustrate the bird's eyes being wide and her neck extended as she tried desperately to understand what was going on, her toes askew and tailfeathers still spread in disorientation as she struggles to understand, still too stunned to calm down and now afraid because she'd never really been handled by a human before...

I used this base, not to trace, but printed and then used as a general reference for child proportions and posing: Two Kids and a Bird by ~Bases-By-Shiro

Then I cropped, recropped, edited out words and sidenotes I'd written, and did some basic lineart clean-up in Photoshop Elements 7. (Just enough to remove distractions; I like keeping in erased lines and angles.)