How To Make A Simple Bird Flourish (Tutorial + 20+ Examples)

As if calligraphy flourishes weren’t already creative, complex and elevated enough… cue the birds! Bird flourishes range from simple birds to amazingly complex compositions with endless loops, ribbons and detail.

We’re going to show you both modern and historical examples of bird flourishes, plus give you step-by-step instructions so that you can draw your first bird flourish.

Modern and Historical Examples

Bird flourishes aren’t new: they date back centuries. These examples from the past serve as great inspiration for modern calligraphers.

Here are some bird flourish photographs from Real Pen Work: Self Instructor in Penmanship (1881, source), The Business Educator (1918, source) and the Clinton Clark Scrapbook (early 20th century, source):

One of our favorite references for bird flourishes is Ornate Pictorial Calligraphy by Lupfer (source). If you flip you through older calligraphy references, you can imagine how many attempts it took to get each composition just right.

As you’ll see in the tutorial below, we start first by drawing our flourishes in pencil, then recreating the composition in ink. We also love flourishing digitally on the iPad thanks to the flexibility when editing and practicing (the undo button is your best friend when learning!).

Here are examples of our own original bird flourishes drawn in ink or digitally using the Procreate app:

Origins of Bird Flourishing

Like the more familiar calligraphy flourishes, the origins of using birds to decorate your writing go way back. While early examples reach back to the Renaissance, the use of bird flourishes became incredibly popular during 19th century in the Golden Age of Penmanship.

Traditional print manuals such as the Universal Penman by George Bickham are filled with examples of embellished calligraphy. Sometimes Bickham chooses decorative flourishes but every once in a while, he also has simple animals such as a fish or bird to further enhance his writing:

Master calligraphers started using more and more elaborate flourishes in their writing. By designing stunning flourishes such as flowers, birds or even fish, true lettering artists could show off their skills. Likewise, the long, flowing swirls and lines found in bird flourishes make them a great way to practice control of the pen.

You may also like: The Rich History of Calligraphy

Why Birds?

When you flip through old calligraphy books, you often find birds used as decorative elements. While they are certainly beautiful, there are a few particular reasons why calligraphers often choose birds for their ornamental flourishes.

Many birds have a strong symbolic meaning which makes them more than just a nice addition to a piece of calligraphy. Think of the dove as a symbol of peace and harmony, an eagle as a symbol of patriotism or a bird of prey as a symbol of strength.

The aerodynamic shapes of birds like eagles or doves can easily be replicated with a pointed pen. Whether it’s wings or the soft shape of their bodies, a few long lines are enough to outline the entire animal. Add some shading to the mix and your flourish turns into a true piece of art!

The feathers in the wings or tails of a bird flourish also show off impressive penmanship technique. Besides doves, calligraphers often choose more unusual birds, such as peacocks or swans, that allowed them to really show off their mastery of the pen.

We’re going to teach you how to write create your own simple bird composition. Draw along with our instructions below, and watch our YouTube tutorial for even more tips:

Supplies

You need a few items to make your first bird flourish. Traditionally, bird flourishes were part of the more historic scripts like Spencerian or Copperplate. This is why we’re using ink and a pointed pen for our final composition.

Like most flourishes, we highly recommend you use a pencil to plan them out. After all, what’s worse than making a beautiful composition but running out of space on the page!

We made our project below with just these supplies:

• Pencil (+ eraser!)
• Paper
• Pointed pen (oblique holder)
• Sumi ink

For practice creating flourishing shapes and patterns, get worksheets in our free course Simple to Spectaular:

How to Draw Beautiful Flourished Birds

Ready to try your hand at your first bird flourish? At first glance, the simple lines of our bird makes it look deceptively easy. However, getting the proportions for this kind of flourishing just right is even more difficult than normal flourishes.

Drawing a bird involves several long lines for the wings and body. An easy tip: We’ve found that placing a small dot to mark the end of your lines can really help with the overall design.

To understand how you can make a simple bird, we’ll take a closer look at the different elements that make up a bird’s shape. After you’ve tried this example, we highly encourage you to have fun coming with your own design!

Let’s look at the individual design features in turn and see how they all connect.

Wings

While the wings are a great place to show off some skill, we’ll start off with a simple version for our example.

1. Start the left wing by making a gentle, long s-curve that descends to the right. Make sure it’s not too long. The right wing starts a little further down and to the left of the right one. Aim for a spot that is close to the first wing.
2. To close the wings, you can either choose a continuous line or simply add some small lines to suggest feathers. This adds a little more depth to your bird flourish.

The wings really set the tone for the rest of the bird and it’s really helpful to plan your lines out. We normally like to place a small dot at the end of the line, this way we have something to aim for.

Since you’re not working on our final project yet, you don’t have to worry about shading (adding contrast to) your lines.

Head, Neck and Beak

There is a long tradition in calligraphy of depicting doves and they often look up towards the writing. For our bird flourish example, I decided to follow the tradition and have our bird look in the same direction.

The line for the neck and head of the bird starts between the wings and gently curves up. Try to keep a subtle curve here for the neck and a round line for the head.

To draw the beak, pay attention to the curves in your lines. They need to be subtle, yet present. Getting the beak right is actually a little tricky. Get it right and the bird faces upward, get it wrong and the mouth will look less like a peaceful dove and more like a seagull ready to steal a French fry out of your hand. Here are the steps:

1. The first half of the beak consists of a small, slightly curved line upwards followed by a longer downward s-curve that goes down (possibly a little further than you might think!)
2. Draw a thin line up about as high as where the beak starts
3. Finish with a thin downward line that eventually connects with the neck and body of the bird

Where the top half of the beak is thick, the bottom half is a lot thinner. Make sure to keep the lines for the bottom of the beak closer together.

If you’re feeling extra fancy, add a little branch to its beak for that extra level of detail!

Body

Creating the body is relatively straightforward and it consists of a single line that starts at the beak and runs parallel to the right wing.

Although it’s a single line, it helps to think of it as if it consisted of two parts:

1. For the neck, using a more or less straight line gives your bird breat form. This makes sure that the neck stays visibly separated from the body
2. After a straight line for the neck, the line curves as it follows the shape of the lower part of the wing

To create the nice and round little dove, make sure the line for the body is nice and curved.

Eye

To us, it feels like the flourish almost comes alive once you put in the eye. All of the sudden it goes from being a few lines to an actual bird. For our bird flourish example, we decided to add a little extra drama by giving it an eye as well as eyelashes.

To create the eye and the eyelashes, it’s important to keep the “direction” of the eye parallel to the direction of the head.

1. Draw an s-curve that slightly tapers off about halfway between top and bottom of the neck, just a little bit before where the beak ends
2. After you make the first one, draw a parallel line that closely follows your first curve
3. Complete the eye with a small c-curve on the other side
4. Fill in the eye

Although we told you not to worry about shading, using a little here to mark the area for the eye can be helpful here.

Tail Feathers

No bird is complete without some beautiful plumes! Even our simple bird flourish deserves some gorgeous tail feathers.

For the best results, keep the following three things in mind:

• Tail feathers should be at least as long as the body of the bird
• Draw the longest feather first
• The longest feather always goes in the middle. Placing two dots to mark the starting area for the tail feathers will help a lot here!

While the curvature of the feathers is up to you, make sure that they’re long enough. Think of the largest of the tail feathers as the second half of a long compound curve. The bird’s body is the first half and the line simply continues on into the tail.

After you’ve drawn the first and longest feather, fill out the tail by adding the rest. Make sure to draw each additional feather as curves that gradually get shorter. Each of them starts along the same line before tapering off.

If you’d like to create more impressive plumage for your bird flourish, you can go a lot longer than what we did for our example.

Now that we have the basic design down, let’s move on to creating our final project with ink!

Final Version in Pointed Pen

One of the biggest differences between using pencil and pointed pen is the need to constantly turn the page around. Shading only works on downstrokes (learn more here if you’re not familiar with downstrokes/upstrokes) so you need to take the direction of your strokes into account.

Unlike normal calligraphy where you would write the letters of a word in order, making bird flourishes involves a lot of moving back and forth. Be careful not to smudge the ink!

Where to Put the Shading

Bird flourishes are an excellent opportunity to practice pressure control. You need to have command of your pen to make the long strokes, curves and swirls with even shading.

Consider adding shading to the following parts:

• Wings: The second half of the s-curve as well as the curve at the bottom of the right wing
• Head and Neck: Draw the line a little thicker at the back of the head. This means starting at the beak!
• Beak: A very subtle shading in the corner of the mouth looks great!
• Eye: Add just a touch of eye-liner above the eye. While you’re at it, add a few thin decorative lines like we did in our example for some extra charm
• Tail: Start with long, shaded lines for the feathers that gently taper off near the end. Add thin strokes in between the thick feathers to flesh out the tail a little more

Keep in mind that these are just ideas for you to try, and there’s no “right” way to create your bird (as you saw in all of the creative historical examples!). What we have here is really the starting point for your own journey, and all of the different options are option to your interpretation. We really recommend experimenting and would love to see some examples of your own style.

You may also like: Copperplate Flourishing Examples

How to Practice Making Bird Flourishes

Learning the art of bird flourishing takes practice, but it’s very approachable – especially if you’re already doing calligraphy. Here are some practice tips to help you feel confident:

• Have Confidence: If you can do the calligraphy basic strokes, you can do this.
• Start Small: Even the pros had to start somewhere. Don’t bite off more than you can chew here!
• S-Curves: If you haven’t noticed already, the s-curve is one of the most common lines in bird flourishes. Taking the time to practice them will make it a lot easier to create your first bird

As long as you approach it like you did when you learned normal flourishing for Copperplate or Modern Calligraphy, you’ll get the hang of it in no time.

Want some practice inspiration? Here is a page from Real Pen Work with a before and after picture done by “Little Frank Bliss.” The publication included this encouragement:

“Such wonderful improvement by a child in only one day is something never heard of before, and is only accounted for by the Tracing Process.”

While this isn’t the exact practice technique that we teach, we love the positivity.

P.s. If you like the historical handwriting references, you’ll love our handwriting guide.

Are You Ready to Learn Calligraphy?

How did your first bird turn out?! We think it’s pretty amazing what you can create with some simple shapes. You can try this just for fun, or add to an elaborate wedding invitation or handmade diplomas or certificates. We would love to hear how your practice is going in the comments.

We hope you enjoyed this lesson on making bird flourishes, as well as the inspirational examples from historical texts and our own modern interpretations. If you’d like to learn more about flourishing, take our free flourishing course Simple to Spectacular: