Today, though it is sad, I did a watercolor study of a blackbird female that died after flying into our patio window. Just as other naturalists before me have done, I took advantage of having a real bird in front of me and did a study as quickly as I could. I find that if you love nature you can do this as a way of showing respect for the creature and not think of it as ‘gross’. Of course always be careful handling things like this by washing your hands after, putting it on plastic, not having food or drink nearby while working…just to be safe. I did notice a little tiny bug or two on it as I worked, which made me work even quicker, to get it out of the house sooner!
Watercolor study of Female Blackbird-stage 1
The picture above shows my pencil sketch and beginning stages of watercolor. I am laying in the golden color that I see ‘under’ the darker colors of the feathers.
Watercolor study of Female Blackbird-stage 2
Here I put dark tone on the tail and more darks on the head and some cool tones along the side of the breast to start to round the form.
Watercolor study of Female Blackbird-stage 3
Some more dark tones and details are laid in, feathers on ‘bottom’ wing.
Watercolor study of Female Blackbird-stage 4
At this stage I stopped painting feeling it was done, at least working from the ‘real’ model. I put a light wash of cool blue on the belly and added more color to the breast along with more details there.
Watercolor study with Blackbird
When I stood up and looked from further back, I felt it needed a more broad wash of dark on the birds right side so I just grabbed my brush and quickly washed some tone on, while standing up. Many times I like to work on my watercolors from a standing position to keep them loose and free; if it’s a detailed painting I like to either start it while standing to have a loose feel, or at least finish it this way. I could add some loose color around the bird, but I just didn’t feel like adding to it.
My set up to add final details from computer
So on another day I set up to touch up details using my photographs of the dead bird from my laptop. I used my field pan of watercolors and brushes and a magnifying glass to help me see details.
Watercolor study of female Blackbird - stage 6
At this point I decided it was finished. To be honest, I wanted to go back and ‘scratch’ out highlights along the legs to show their shine and make them stand out from the dark background, I also wanted to add grasses around the bird, but I’ve had too many other things to work on and just didn’t get time. So it’s DONE.
Blackbird male
I don’t want to leave you with a dead Blackbird, here’s two photos of a healthy male so you can see how nice they look, their song is even nicer!
Blackbird male
As a side note, the Blackbird (UK) is in the Thrush family just as my American Robin is. For my American readers you’ll notice a very close silhouette to our Robin, and the song, though different is beautiful as thrush songs are. The male Blackbird is ‘black’ with a yellow beak, the female looks, well like my painting, brown with speckles on breast.
Just some little sketches from my field book. I pick up leaves just like so many people do, I can’t help it, they call to me from the ground all wet and shiny and brilliant colors. Each one calls, “Pick me up, pick me!” I end up with a pile tucked into my sketchbook where they get nicely pressed but I usually only have time to get one done before they lose their vibrant color. That’s what happened here, I wanted to use my watercolor pencils (and waterbrush) to test colors it would take and the second day when I went to finish it the leaf had already faded quite a bit.
European Goldfinches
The Goldfinches were neat, they kept landing in the long grass in front of my window and eating the dandelion seeds from the seed heads. It was funny to see this one bird with a seed sticking out of his beak, he’s twirl it around from one side of his beak to the other, it looks like a cigarette in the sketch! I used my watercolor pencils for this too, with a waterbrush.
Hi folks, just passing on some great news, I have three paintings I submitted to be juried for the Miniature Painters, Sculptors + Gravers Society in Washington DC and all were accepted! Yay! The three paintings I entered are following, click on each to see them larger in my gallery and more details about each. I even have links there to blog posts about how I painted them, have a look!
Here is a direct quote from their website about the society: “The Miniature Painters, Sculptors & Gravers Society of Washington, DC, (MPSGS) was founded in 1931 by Alyn Williams (1865-1941), a well-known portrait miniaturist. The MPSGS is the oldest Miniature Art Society in the U.S. It is the second oldest in the world next to the Royal Society of Miniature Painters, Sculptors and Gravers in London, England–the world’s first Miniature Art Society also founded by Mr. Williams. The Inaugural Exhibition of the MPSGS of Washington, DC, was held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in December 1931. The Society has held exhibitions annually for 71 years with the exception of the years 1932 and 1942.”
Let me know if you live in the DC area and are going to the show. I’ll be unable to attend as I’ll still be in England.
Just had to share some good news, today I sold one of my bird paintings! I have just recently decided to release this one, I painted it in 1985 and never really wanted to part with it. I met Shirley and she told me it really caught her eye and though I’ve had people desire to buy it before, I just never felt ready to let it go. Well, it’ll have a good home I think, both her and her husband love nature and art. I think she came to the right place then at my gallery as those are two things very important to me!
Shirley with her new painting!
The painting is done with soft pastels for the background and oil pastels for the bird. I was difficult to do the details in oil pastels but I chiseled off the tip of the crayon to make small marks. A light hand and building layers of color is important. Shirley asked about how it feels to part with a painting and commented on how hard it must be. I think an artist has to decide, some of their art they can keep forever or pass down to their loved ones, but it feels good to share what others see as a treasure and beautiful. I love sharing my love of my subjects, birds, horses, trees, nature and people.
Proud owner of a new painting
To see more bird paintings visit my gallery, I have four different sections in the bird gallery- birds of prey, owls, water birds and perching birds. Click here to visit. I also have interesting paintings with birds in my Fantasy Gallery and my Goddesses Gallery.
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My finished miniature watercolor painting of a Great Grey Owl, measuring a mere 2″x2″! Be sure to check it out in my Owl Gallery too. It’s an owl named “Aspen” that I photographed at the Keilder Water Bird of Prey Centre in Northumberland England. I’ll show you the stages of painting and talk about how I did it below.
"Great Grey Owl" -first washes
This shows the first stages of painting, the beginning washes to lay down the values, color hue and expression of the painting. I first started with a light sketch in pencil, lifting it as much as I could with a kneaded rubber eraser before painting. Then I painted the washes and sprinkled salt on wet areas to see how it would ‘pull’ the color and create interesting patterns. It is at this stage of the painting that you can get a feel for how the painting will go, will you be loose and expressive? Will you go for more details? Sometimes I think we have to let our intuition guide us, or perhaps our mood.
First wash set up
This picture shows you my set up for the first washes, I always start flat on the table so the color doesn’t run. Many times on larger paintings I stand up and work loosely with my brush. (check out this short Utube video of me working on the “Screech Owl” painting, it shows how I paint loosely when standing). This set up shows my photo reference to the left, the salt above that, then my field palette to the right because I’m right handed, the water bowl above that. I keep a white paper towel folded nearby for wiping off excess water and it allows me to see if there’s paint left on my brush. You see my magnifying lamp which I find good because the light is cool and matches daylight; but I don’t use the magnifier on it as I find it clumsy to use my brushes under it and I bump into all the time when I lean in super close! Sometimes I use a hand held magnifying glass or you’ll see pictures later of my glasses.
Great Grey Owl -stage 3
Now here in stage 3 you see I’ve jumped ahead with lots of details and color. As you work, squint your eyes at the photo and your painting to catch large areas of value that need to be developed and notice color hues. At one point I felt my owl was too brown so I washed a very watered down blue grey over areas, but only on very dry areas. In areas you need to lighten you can either lift color with a damp brush and blot with a paper towel, or you can add it using white watercolor or gauche mixed with your paint colors.
Now on purpose I’m going to point out some things that I found to be unsatisfactory in my painting and I changed. At stage 3 here, I felt like I did a pretty nice painting! I was feeling like it was done, ah….no such luck. If you let it sit a day or two and return to it, or if you show it with the photo reference to a friend with a sharp eye, they’ll be sure to catch something ‘off’ with it. If you’re a conscientious artist, you’ll be bothered by it until you fix it and you probably already knew it was wrong to begin with but wanted to ignore it! Well lets just say my boyfriend has a good eye, sigh, well now he ‘did’ pick me didn’t he? We both agreed the beak wasn’t right, I pointed it out to him then when he agreed it was back to the easel with it. I can’t believe how much I was able to amend the beak being that this is watercolor after all. People are afraid of watercolor because they think it’s unforgiving, wait until you see the changes I made.
Great Grey Owl -stage 4
Stage 4 shows the beak changed, I totally moved the angle of it and lengthened it! (see the enlargements below of these final stages too) If you take a damp brush and gently re-wet an area, and only the area you want to fix, you can then repeatedly rub it gently with a damp brush tip, blot it with a clean paper towel (I prefer Viva!) then clean your brush, wipe it off and repeat. Do this over and over, you’ll be amazed at how much you can lift. When I repainted the beak I thought like an oil painter, I laid down a more opaque yellow layer to clean and brighten the beak, then I kept putting washes over this dry layer to affect the color. It ended up with an unusual translucent look like a real beak would have.
As I did this, of course I started to notice other areas I wanted to improve upon. Sigh…such is the plight of an artist with a picky eye! Notice the area of light tan below his beak, I needed to bring out the lightness of it so I added white watercolor to some cad.yellow, and browns to create a tint for an underlayer. Another note about this painting, next time I will pick a much smoother paper, working with this much detail you need to keep your paper super smooth with no distracting texture.
Great Grey Owl -stage 5
Stage 5 shows how I painted detail on top of the tan area under the beak and the beak has more details added. The owl has an overall lighter look, this is because I kept stroking on little feathers with a tint of whitish blue grey to add detail. Now I thought I was done here, but remember that boyfriend of mine with the good eye? Well he helped me notice I had painted out the nostril! SIGH….yes, when I was adding the little hairs by the beak I must have done that so back to the easel. The picture at the beginning of the post is the final stage, fixed and finished!
Working with my magnifying glasses
This is me working with my reading glasses on and a little set of clip on magnifier lenses. In the photo I have the magnifying lenses lifted up so I can look at the paints in front of me, if they were down I’d need to get much closer to see what I was doing. So I would lift the lenses up when I would sit back a bit and take a look at the ‘whole’ painting and the photo, looking for areas that need attention. Then I’d flip them back down and get close for the detail painting. I wouldn’t use them for the initial stages of painting, you don’t want to focus on details at that point.
Also you notice here my setup is different than before, I have another pan of watercolors and have them set up on some jars so they are closer to my painting. Working with a tiny brush ( 10/0 liner) it dries out super fast and keeping my pallet nearer seemed to help. The nice thing about working on a miniature painting was being able to mix small amounts of color right in the pan lid. (the brush in the picture is not my liner brush)
The pictures below are so you can look at one section close up to see the changes I made to the beak and area around it.
Great Grey Owl close up detail stage 3
Great Grey Owl close up detail stage 4
Great Grey Owl close up detail stage 5
Great Grey Owl -close up detail finished
I hope you’ve enjoyed my post about my painting. I looked forward to showing you my mistakes and how I fixed things as I painted because this is how it goes, it’s a process and doesn’t always go as easy as it looks. I like to encourage my students and others to keep looking at their paintings for more detail but most of all a good beginning drawing is crucial. As you can see here, I missed the beak angle and had to fix it later, but the more you paint and draw the better you’ll be at catching these things in your work. That’s my two cents! Please leave me some comments and if you are interested in note card or prints please let me know.
For the fun of it, here’s some Utube links with owls!
I like to keep my field kit ready at hand to grab and it was a good thing today. I had a doctor’s appointment that I knew would be a long wait and lucky I had my kit. I threw a handful of 4×5 owl photos from my trip to England, into my bag; this will give me a chance to sketch some ideas for larger paintings. Here is the sketch of a young Spectacled Owl sitting on my gloved hand at the Kielder Water Bird of Prey Centre in Northumberland.
"Spectacled Owl Sketch"
I’ll be working on this some more and then post it, not sure if it’ll be watercolor or not. You can see a picture of me holding him on my “About Me“ page.
This is a miniature painting of a Snowy Egret done in Inktense Watersoluble Ink Pencil, black. It’s very small, 2.25″ x 3.25″ and I used just water and a small brush to wet the pencil as I worked. I wanted to keep it fresh looking with pencil scribbles showing and blotches of ink. I like the dynamics of that, reminds me more of nature sometimes rather than a perfectly and meticulously painted peice.
When you work with inktense pencils you can either rub at the lines with a wet brush to eliminate the pencil marks or brush lighter to leave them there. Also if you draw on wet paper be forwarned it will draw very dark and quite permanent! The properties of these pencils are such that if you let the worked area dry it will be more permanent than watercolor pencils or watercolor. You can work over it without lifting the colors. I enjoy their boldness and the mixture of water media and dry media.
My third day at Muncaster was so full, I did two posts to cover it, this is the second half!
The following pictures are all from the World Trust Owl Centre at Muncaster Castle on September 9th in the late afternoon after a busy day filled with hiking and exploring the castle. At the end of my day I walked around the owl yard and sketched a little…I was quite tired so I didn’t sketch too much! It was raining gently so I limited myself to a few brown watercolor pencils and watersoluble graphite pencils, a brown micron pen and a sepia micron pen. I listed the owls of England on my sketchbook page; Long Earred Owl, Short Earred Owl, Little Owl, Tawny Owl, White Breasted Barn Owl.Above is a Buzzard that is being brought out to take part in the Bird of Prey show they put on everyday behind the castle.
This is a Buffy Fish Owl, they have a funny sort of look with their ‘ears’ flopping out to the sides many times.
This is a Mackinder’s Eagle Owl…the Eagle Owls are some of the largest owls in the world. I just love the sleepy look of this bird…I really want to do a painting of this one!
This gorgeous bird is the Oriental Bay Owl; I just love it’s patterns and colors! I feel another painting coming on!
This is a video of Red Tailed Kites flying around in their pen. Such a beautiful bird, it’s centres like this one that help educate people about Birds of Prey so they won’t kill them in the wild or take their eggs.
Well I decided that I’d concentrate on birds of prey amongst all the other nature stuff I’m painting. It’s great to concentrate on a particular subject for awhile; you’ll learn more information as you read about it, visit locations where it can be studied in real life and ask questions of those who know more than you about your subject.
This little (3.5″x3.5″) watercolor painting is a warm up for a larger painting I want to do in oil. I am working from photographs by my photographer friend Gene Witkowski (of Buffalo) from when we went to the Sterling Renaissance Festival three years ago. (wow has it been that long??) After that I became a full time artisan there but never had time to go visit the acts and see the owls or joust first hand. So now I use the invaluable photos. The oil painting I’m going to do is a full size pose of this owl named Boo, sitting on the gloved hand of his owner Jenn, who did the bird of prey show.
She told me he was an African Eagle Owl, now that I read about the Eagle Owls, I’ve learned he is indeed an Eurasian Eagle Owl (Bubo bubo) and that the ones found in Africa would be smaller and greyer as he is. I wondered because as I read about them it says they are brown mostly, and mine was not. Another fact I never knew, our Great Horned Owl is an Eagle Owl, Cool!
Below shows my set up as I worked, I put a masonite drawing board on top of a tv tray table and this is where I plunk myself sometimes to work near the woodstove. Ahhhh, you can’t beat that heat when it’s freezing outside! I limited myself to my field palette of watercolors and yes, I had to use the reading glasses! An invaluable tool when working on tiny paintings!
In this post I bring you two owls, both are Barn Owls but look very different. The first is a sketch of a Barn Owl from the United States, the typical light heart shaped face and brown markings on the feathers. I think the same species is what you see in the UK, but theirs are slightly different in color or size. I need to research this further! (a note from me…I did put this up in a post back in August, but this shows it scanned in much clearer and the framed version.)
I used watersoluble graphite (graphitint) color pencils to do it, and a waterbrush to blend and make washes with the drawn lines. The property I like about watercolor type pencils is how you can leave the drawn lines if you like, it give a certain texture. If you don’t like that, just rub it a little more with the brush tip and it will all go to wash. The original sketch is only 2.5″ x 3.5″ big; it’s already been sold but I do have mini framed prints of it available, note cards and 8×10 handsigned prints. The original sketch is only 2.5″ x 3.5″ big; it’s already been sold but I do have mini framed prints available (shown below), note cards and 8×10 handsigned prints. This owl below is an Ashy Faced Barn Owl, an owl I never heard of until I visited the Kielder Water Bird of Prey Centre in Northumberland England. The owner let me take pictures of their owl, telling me it’s an uncommon bird even in England. It’s a young owl, you can see some of the down poking out from the feathers still. It’s dark face contrasted by it’s golden feathers were fascinating to look at! I looked it up in my two huge owl books and can’t find it in there, time to research this one more also!
This tiny painting was done exclusivly with watercolors and a tiny brush, it measures 2.5″ x 3″. The original has sold but I have tiny framed prints (shown below) available and note cards. Just email me to inquire: mary@marymcandrew.com
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