Each sketch is practice for the next one. None of them are perfect, each of them is a small improvement.

Not always an improvement in art. I am not an artist, at least not professionally.

But each sketch is an improvement in observation, in seeing what is there, in beholding the chickadee.

I keep trying to practice what my colleague and friend Scott Parsons taught me years ago:

“Sketch what you see, not what you think you see.”

The difference between those two is often far greater than we allow ourselves to admit.

Sketching birds is one way to expose ourselves to our tendency to give more credence to what we think we see or to what we want to see than to what actually presents itself to us in the world.

Two illustrations of birds, likely chickadees, perched on branches, are drawn with a smaller sketch beside them on tan paper.&10;&10;That’s what AI came up with. And yes, they’re attempts at black-capped chickadees. The one on top is from yesterday and it is hunched over and the proportions are off. So are the colors. The one in the middle of the page is much closer in both shape and color to what I saw with my eyes — and with my camera. In the lower left is a pen sketch of the shapes of the chickadee, a practice in seeing just certain aspects of the bird.