Happy birdday, Singapore!

The story behind the two Singapore birds started innocently. I had just bought a really cool Cretacolour Monolith pencil - it's pure graphite without the wood casing and is simply enclosed by a layer of shiny lacquer. So based on the flimsy excuse of needing to try out the pencil, I decided to do a pencil sketch of a mynah.

Why a mynah? Well, it's the true Singaporean bird - so common that they even share our love of hawker centres! My family kept a few of them as pets when I was growing up. They're super intelligent birds, some of them can even learn to talk like parrots. We had one that was so tame we could let it out of the cage and it would perch at the window and sing to itself, without flying away.

So yeah, I have a soft spot for mynahs. Plus they're black, which makes them the perfect subject for a pencil drawing.

In the end, because I only had a 2B pencil and no other grade, I had to use a black coloured pencil to shade some of the darker areas, to deepen the contrast.

That was quick and quite fun, so I thought I would draw another bird, this time a sparrow. I thought it would be nice to use brown coloured pencils instead of a regular pencil, so this piece was done using three Polychromos coloured pencils - Nougat, Van Dyke Brown and Dark Sepia, together with a black coloured pencil.

Why the sparrow? Because the sparrow represents God's love and care to even the least of us. I often call my son, Andre, a big sparrow as he doesn't worry too much about tomorrow but God always seems to come through for him.

"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care" - Matthew 10:29

For animals, I usually start with the eyes because if you can't get the eyes right, the animal won't look good.

What was supposed to be an easy sketch ended up taking very long because I kept obsessing over the  details and went back to add more and more stuff! But am quite happy with the result in the end.

"Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" - Matthew 6:26