Jillian Ditner lightly pencils in a circle for a head and sketches the eye. She places the beak, wing and tail. Just shapes at first, gradually a Cape May warbler emerges.
"I'm always paying attention to the posture and the angle of the body when I'm drawing," said Ditner, a nature illustrator with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. "You can see that from the tip of the tail to the bill, the whole bird is on a bit of a forward lean. Capturing that is going to get the dynamic part of that pose to come through."
Once she has the proportions perfect, she adds detail with a sharp pencil before layering in color in watercolor. Getting the eye just right comes toward the end.
Scientific accuracy underlies art for Jillian Ditner, staff biological illustrator for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and graphics editor for its Living Bird magazine.
"I like to have everything in place, and then there's that little gratifying moment of it coming together - that little pop of the eye coming to life," she said.
As staff biological illustrator at the Cornell Lab and graphics editor for its Living Bird magazine, Ditner is part science communicator, part artist. As an educator and coordinator of the Bartels Science Illustration Program, she mentors artists who hope to follow in her footsteps.
Birds are deceptively complex. Understanding the bones, muscles and feather groups is what makes an illustration come alive.
"They're like a little feather puff, right?" Ditner said. "We look at them and they're kind of rounded, a little bit pointy, but what's going on underneath all those feathers is really intricate. Unless you understand what's going on underneath, you don't understand why the feathers are doing what they're doing."
Ditner studied fine arts in college, but a love of birds and nature brought her to scientific illustration when she got involved with organizations that advocate for turning off nighttime lights that disrupt bird migrations.
"That was a big bird-and-design-coming-together moment for me," she said.
A Bartels illustrator-in-residence in 2017, Ditner returned to run the program in 2019.
