Zeus is a feathered friend

Hi everyone! this is Zeus the blind owl. He may not be very popular but he is a rescued owl who is blind but his eyes are beautiful! He has an instagram page. I could say he is one of my inspirations to make realism art. I wanted to capture his beauty.

His instagram

Just a quick preview of his insta page, give it a follow if you like.
So Zeus is a screech owl.
If you compare on the picture below you see how his eyes are just a jumbled jelly type rather than having bright yellow eyes with big black pupils.

This little guy is just so beautiful and inspiring.

He looks great. He's ten years old.
Image source: Reddit

The art process

Here are some work in progress pictures

I start with a light sketch and layer the eyes with some blue, purple and pink colors. I guess I use the rainbow already with this. Layering and putting a shiny sphere effect through leave out method.

Here I drew feathers slowly each by stroke. Color green always helps things look more natural and realistic. So this is a blend of colors layered one after the other

Now it looks more complete

I do the rest of the feathers and then I try to do a green background

there are stil some blank spaces, and I have to say the background for this was still complicated for me at that time I am really not used to drawing backgrounds. Blending this was a challenge

Then it is done!
I adjusted the contrast and shadows for this by a bit. For the eyes I added white ink and black ink to make the dark parts recede and highlighrs for the shiny parts especially the reflections of light on the eyes.

I hope you all liked my artwork presentation today!

Let me know what you think in the comments below!

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