Final Chicken Drawing

Last week I posted some sketches of chickens and grapes.  No, I wasn’t inspired by a recipe.  A friend wants to give a gift to some winemakers whose chickens trespass into the vineyard and eat their grapes. A reproduction of this sketch is going to be the front cover illustration on a handmade wine album.

It turns out I had the chickens all wrong.  I had imagined them as garden variety chickens, and they are in fact white silkies, or nègre-soie, in French, a rare and beautiful ornamental breed. The really strange thing is that their flesh is black, whch I can imagine has saved more than one from ending up as a poule au pot.  I’ve done the best I could here from photos on the web.

I’d love to sneak over to the vineyard and draw some of these from life!