I love ravens. Crows and magpies and jays too…all corvids, really. One of my favorite recent moments of wonder–what, you don’t collect moments of wonder? you should start immediately– happened while reading about the intelligence of the Caledonian crows in Jennifer Ackerman’s Genius of Birds . The complexity and nuance of their behavior, in lab settings and in the wild, is astonishing.

While I’m not particularly anthropocentric, I am still occasionally reminded that humans aren’t so special after all…and corvids are good at reminding us of that. In so many ways. Intricate social relationships, abstract thought, tool use, cultural transmission- corvids have it all.

I have drawn and painted many corvids, and I hope draw and paint many more. This one is in graphite, including Mars Lumograph Blacks.

Here’s a worksheet from my sketchbook. I spent some time working out values and practicing that amazing eye. Actually, I like this preliminary drawing of the raven’s eye better than the final product…ah well.

Graphite is such an amazing medium. I wish it were better appreciated among collectors; purchasing drawings, from rough sketches to full graphite paintings, is an awesome way to build a collection. I have a few sketches from Golden Age illustrators that I treasure, and whereas I’d never be able to afford any of their fully rendered paintings, I was able to find them at fairly decent prices.

Also they’re so expressive. So much of the artist’s hand is visible in drawings. graphite or otherwise, that you can feel as if the artist had just been there, just sitting in your kitchen chair, sketching away while you putter around the evening’s dishes. Drawings are about presence, and attention, and real warm human hands doing human things.

I’d love to see what a raven would draw if I gave him a pencil.