How to Color a Turkey Head When Drawing

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Matt Cail and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you easy ways to draw turkey cartoons for this holiday season. Now comes the fun part. We get to move on to coloring and to get ready for coloring, make sure and break out all of your colored pencils. Specifically, you are going to need a lot of different colors to do a turkey right. Just off the top of my head, you are going to need black, you are going to need blue, sort of a reddish pink, tan, dark brown, light brown, and you are going to have some white colors, but you shouldn't have to worry about drawing that in. A really good thing again is going back to a point of reference; not even necessarily a photograph. You can see from this little guy here that turkeys have a lot of colors. They are not just a basic gray brown duck or goose. So, you definitely want to keep that in mind. It's going to make your turkey a lot more realistic to add those colors. So let's start of on the head area for our coloring exercise. I usually like to start out using black, and this is not going to be an exception. Taking the black colored pencil, we are going to go around and outline in the eyes. Turkeys actually have black eyes. That's a little point I break with when cartoonizing a turkey. Big, big black or even small beady black eyes don't work very well for cartoon characters. But you can certainly outline it in black and you can have black pupils. Next, we are going to be putting in some nice light blue around the immediate eye area. Again, applying it in nice light strokes; it doesn't have to be super dark. After that, we are going to break out some red; time to color in the snood. I love saying the word "snood." We are going to basically color all of that in the red. In here, you know, you want to make sure...this is pretty brilliant. If your pencil starts breaking in your hands, you are pressing too hard. But make sure you have a solid red color here. It's one of the more garish, fun colors of a turkey. Then, taking a tan color, we are going to draw in the beak. Sometimes, the beak is even more understated than tan. Don't use bright yellow if you have any other options. I find the tan is a lot more of a subtle and more fun effect. "