Little chicken growing up!

Dear all,

As you have noticed, I didn’t add anything recently . In my last post I explained that the little chicken had died and that two sketches are still sitting on my desk. But there was another problem: these two sketches are digital and on an external hard disk that is broken. As are all the other drawings.. I already had the disk checked by the manufacturer, but there they said that I first had to let a specialized company recover the data before they could repair it. To make a long story short: that is still in the planning, but will take a while before I know if the data can be repaired and when I get it after that.

In the mean time another of my young chickens got to the same age as the first chicken and I decided to continue the series with this chicken.

So here we are: introducing Chicken! He or she is an almost 3 months old pure bred Breda fowl in the color Splash. The other chicken was related to it, they have the same father, but different mothers . This little chicken is also different from the other one because it has 4 toes instead of 5, as is normal for a pure bred Breda fowl.

It is as tame as the previous one, so I am able to draw it while it is walking around in my studio. As with the other chicken, I will draw it as often as I can, but due to the amount of detail at this age and up, not more than once a week.

I hope you like this new one!

Dear all,

Thanks for all the great reactions! I actually didn’t finish the series: there are still two sketches sitting on my deks for more than half a year now. Reason for this is that this little chicken died on January 8th. She had started moulting just before new year and that, combined with the stress of the fire works in my street, was too much for her. Due to this disappointment, the fact that she almost looked like a grown up already and because I had a very busy time last half year, this series got on a lower priority.

Next month I will actually have more time and I hope to turn the two sketches into real illustrations: one where she is shaking her feathers and an other one where she is in fact dead. Although it is a pity she died, for the series it isn’t that bad: it has a real beginning and end due to this misfortune.

The chicken turned out to be a blue partridge and looked like a Breda fowl despite the fifth toe that came from her silky parent.

And a Christmas chicken! I started this one yesterday, immediately after I finished day sixty, but due to the high amount of detail, I wasn’t able to finish it. So I did that this morning.

Last week I was busy finishing all my work before Christmas, but I did make a first sketch. Here the finished illustration, the chicken was sixty days old last week!

Today just one illustration. This one took me about two hours because of the detail. Since the changes will not be as big as the first three weeks, I am thinking about doing the drawing every other day.