Western Meadowlark Magazine Art

Ready to see my latest bird art? I loved making it. 

 

The project starts with a coloring page of the Western Meadowlark, the state bird of Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, and Wyoming. I found this coloring page at MontanaKids.com, which is run by the Montana Office of Tourism. State websites are a great source for coloring pages and other resources. Obviously, you can use the technique below for any coloring page, or even for a design you draw yourself! 

---------

Western Meadowlark Magazine Art

Materials:

• Western Meadowlark coloring page
• old magazine
• craft glue (affiliate link)

Steps:

Search through the magazine and tear out blocks of color to complete your image. I found the perfect yellow throughout Visit California's Travel Guide. Tear the block of color into small pieces. For a bird, you want those pieces to mimic the shape of feathers, so aim for some longer, thin pieces (rather than squares). 

Use craft glue to adhere the torn pieces to the coloring page. I had planned to start with the bird and then do the background, but realized it would be a lot easier to do the background first and then put the bird in the foreground. So I switched. 

In the photo below, you can see that I tore out pieces for the legs but didn't glue them down. Instead, I started working on the sky. For that, tear long thin strips of sky blue. Don't worry if you cant find enough of the same color blue for such a large area. The real sky has variation. And besides, it's the background. 

After completing the sky, I worked on the fence post, then added the legs and feet on top of that. I tore the beak from the same area as the legs. I used text for the mottled color of the meadowlark's head, wings, and tail. I finished with the black bib and eye. The last step was trimming my artwork to clean up the edges. I cut mine to a square (because I like squares) but it's perfectly fine to leave it rectangular. 

It took me about 75 minutes to make this project from start to finish. It was very relaxing and I'm happy with how it turned out.