I've been agonizing over deciding on plumage for these guys, and I'm still not sure if I'm 100% happy with these options. I know I don't want the bright primary colors of Macaws, or for them to be 1:1 representations of real birds (though the American Avocet colors on #4 were a fun exercise). They also shouldn't be overly detailed - I want them to be fun to draw, not a slog. I was also thinking about how extending the arm shows the usually-hidden inner wing and thought it might be fun to have a contrasty, flashy display in there (though the facial skin is the main display of fitness and emotion).

I think I might narrow it down to the last two as common pattern variants, and experiment with alternate color schemes or pigment mutations.

They are a temperate marshland species, so I stuck with mostly browns and greys to make them feel more commonplace and not overly tropical due to their other similarities with parrots. Incidentally some of the color and facial patterns I gravitated to remind me of Killdeer and Plovers, which live in marshy habitats.

Wool-bearing larva and shepherd. These larva graze on grasses, moss and lichen. Their coarse wooly fibers can be harvested each time the larva sheds its skin to grow. The ancestors of these insects would molt and pupate on a yearly cycle, but shepherds care for them through winters to artificially extend the larval stage for year-round fiber harvests. When it is around three summers old it has a final, especially abundant molt with prized finely textured fibers, then it forms a hard chrysalis. It will overwinter in this state until the following spring, where it emerges as an adult to reproduce.