Artists Photo Reference: Songbirds & Other Favorite Birds

I loved this book!! It really gives me artistic inspiration. I always go back to it, and i use the photo's for many paintings. Bald Eagles, swans, pelicans, and you guessed it... songbirds!! Crisp photography, For a lot of birds they show both sexes, bright colors, I really can't say enough good stuff about this book!!!

Songbirds and Other Favorite Birds has paid for itself several times over in the realistic drawings I've done of various birds from it. The references are well organized and beautiful, the poses the birds are in vary so much that it's easy to combine a pose from one and the anatomy and markings of another, it never fails to catch my interest. I use my copy constantly and have since the day it first arrived. The Artist's Photo Reference series also teaches how to use magazine photos and other images that you don't have copyright to, in ways that do not violate copyright. For anyone who does realistic drawing it's a valuable resource, and the lessons on how to draw and paint are excellent too. Each lesson is in a different medium and explores as many different techniques as possible, so no matter your level of skill, there is probably something in this book you haven't tried. And hundreds of gorgeous references. Each bird gets a page or two of multiple photos labeled male or female where there are differences, often captured at a distance by zoom so they're in motion or in unusual poses. Not many are in flight but there are a few. My only problem with this book and this series is that North Light needs to publish more of them, there are now two Birds books, this one and Artist's Photo Reference: Birds, and you could easily go through several more without exhausting the variety of subject matter. There isn't much overlap between this and Birds -- it fills the gaps nicely and has mostly different species. Where they are the same, the photos are different so both of them have an honored place in my library where no doubt I'll wear them out with decades of use. Get it in hardcover, if you paint birds often you'll want a durable copy.