A picture for the contest http://sobol.furnation.ru/journal/44252/ . The illustration for Shakespeare's poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle".

Some words about practice.
The goals were: a) to draw something more or less noteworthy. Melchior d'Hondecoeter was my inspiration; b) don't lose the energy and wish of doing something during this painting. I consider both goals were reached.
As a bonus I received some knowleges of drawing birds.
The idea about autograph was taken from Aivazovsky:)

Many words about theory (if anybody wants to know).
It wasn't a surprise for me I didn't have many emotions after the first reading. But I hadn't them after the second and so on. I had only technical idea, demandind realization.
So I started to look for information about the mentioned birds. And found a book of the anti-Stratfordian author (you can ask Google about anti-Stratfordians). I had no time to read all book (so I didn't read the author's theory), but I found much information about the book, the poem and characters.Â
After that I seriously changed the composition, added some references and symbolism (still think I'm not good at it).