I’ve been spending a lot of time with this parrot in my studio, slowly building the color and feather detail in pastel pencil. Bright color can look immediate, but creating it is anything but quick. Each area needs layers—shifting the values, adjusting the temperature, softening one edge while sharpening another. The feathers cannot simply be drawn as individual lines. They have to overlap, change direction, and still feel like they belong to the bird as a whole. That balance