GracesWarbler

Thanks! I'll send you a message.

Also, I'm looking for feedback about the book. It's mostly done, but it would be great to get an outside perspective. Anyone want to take a look?

Thanks! Have any of your seen good articles about bird beaks, feathers, or feet/claws? I have three pages in the book about those three topics. I mostly want to talk about the diversity of birds, and maybe highlight one or two interesting examples.

I drew a Vermilion Flycatcher! Now that I'm mostly done with the illustrations for my upcoming coloring book, I've been trying them out. (It's much easier with reference photos.)

The coloring book is coming together. I also made a website! Let me know what you think: https://colorbird.org/ I'll probably add color reference photos for the drawings. Any other suggestions?

Great, thanks you two! I love big water birds, but typically have trouble telling these two kinds of cormorants apart. Plus, I just learned a new birding term: lore.

Hi folks. I'm a bit confused about cormorants. I was in Gilbert, AZ in February and saw a number of cormorants at a park. Here are the birds in question: Since none of these have white borders around their bills, I thought they were all Double-crested Cormorants. However, someone on ebird informed me that the group of birds in the second photo are Neotropic Cormorants. Is this right? What's the best way to distinguish these two species? I know that Double-crested Cormorants are bigger, but judging size is difficult at a distance. Also, the photo below is a Neotropic Cormorant, right? It was seen in Gilbert, AZ in September 2019. Basically, if I see the white border around the bill, it's definitely a Neotropic Cormorant, but if that's missing it doesn't tell me anything? Thanks!

Great, thanks for the ideas! I decided to manually order the birds, so they're semi-random. Also, I made a cover! I'll probably keep working on it, but what do you all think? The colors look a bit different here, so I may have to change it further.

Hey. it's a Cactus Wren! I'm starting to put the book together now. I want to add a couple sentences about each bird, as well as a quick description of their colors. Typography and formatting is a neat subject that I wish I knew more about.

Thanks for the suggestion! Like SirVive mentioned, I tend to think of "the Southwest" as a particular region of the U.S. I'll keep it as-is for now and see if it still sounds natural to me later on. A question: I'm most of the way through the drawings and I'm starting to put the book together now. Is there a good order to put birds in? I may just "wing it" and give them a semi-random order, or I may put the bird in order from smallest to largest. Or is there a nice order to put birds in? I suppose bird guides group birds by type.

I'm most of the way through the drawings for my coloring book, so I started putting things together! Here's the intro page so far. Thoughts? If you have any fascinating trivia for the bird species I've posted so far, feel free to share. I'll be adding a few sentences about each bird, as well as a description of their colors, to the back of each page.

Two new pages: Doves (I need to check what species) and a Burrowing Owl. @Aidan Band @Connor Cochrane: I sent you two messages about your photos. I'd like to round out the book with some species I don't have photos of. Thanks!

Thanks, I'll take a look! Here's a new one: A Vermilion Flycatcher. ("Vermilion" seems like it should have another "L" in it!) I also did a new drawing for Northern Rough-Winged Swallows.

Cool, thanks! I'll check it out. Here's two little drawings. I want to have some small drawings for the title page and the final page. I think the Northern Rough-winged Swallow below looks a bit annoyed. I might try to fix that.

I redid two of the early ones to make them a bit better: a Black-crowned Night Heron and a Red-winged Blackbird! I'm looking for pictures of some iconic southwest birds: Roadrunner, Cactus Wren, Elegant Trogon, Vermilion Flycatcher, and Phainopepla. Anyone have photos of these that I could trace for the book?