Oudry greatly valued his drawings. He rarely gave them away, deliberately keeping them off the market. By his death his drawings were reputedly of the greatest rarity. Oudry was a compulsive draftsman who drew at night, when he could no longer paint. He frequently drew black and white chalk studies of birds, which appear to have been done for their own sake. Hal Opperman dated these sheets, especially those in freer technique, to the 1730s. In 1734 Oudry was appointed director of the Beauvais Tapestry and therefore had access to animal studies by Pieter Boel and Charles Le Brun of which he made frequent copies.