CALL THE CHIROPODIST
Feet. You have to have them, they’re the only thing between you and the pavement and you know what that looked like last night, even if the blood has since washed away and the half-digested kebab has been eaten by a fox . But they’re always awkward to draw, courtesy of the parsimony of paper manufacturers, who never made sheets of paper long enough to get the model’s feet in when you were doing life classes, leaving you tragically short of foot drawing practice. Birds are no exception. Consider the crow above. I had a reasonable stab at rendering the foot in all its clawed and reptilian ugliness but putting the other one in as well resulted in a confused knot that didn’t look like bird feet. So it ended up with just the one foot. The sparrows in the middle were fobbed off with some vague foot-like marks. The poor creature on the right is going to have to get through life with no feet at all, like a London pigeon.
RICHARD SWANN ART 