Hello everyone! I got an email a few days ago asking me to paint the first place winner of a bird breeder show. I want to show you the process as I go along.
This species of bird is a European Society Finch, a domesticated breed that was originally imported to Europe from Japan. This particular winning bird is a very elegant black variety with a white and black patterned breast. As the species originated from Japan, I chose to replace the bird perch with a branch of cherry blossoms, painted a delicate pale pink. I’ve done a few portraits before for bird shows like this one and it is always satisfying to pair birds with the flowers of their homelands.
For this painting, I started with gathering reference material and putting images together to create a photo collage. This process can be tricky, as I need to be careful of the copyright rules surrounding an image to avoid legal battles. I do my best to use photos with permission when I can and rely on CC0 liscensed images for the rest as CC0’s allow me to use the image as I see fit, sometimes with credit to the original creator. I estimate where the details of the images need to be as I combine them into the collage using the drawing app Procreate, which takes a fair amount of time.
Once I’m happy with the collage and placement of the images in Procreate, I use a projector to shine the collage onto a page of watercolor paper and then sketch the lines out in pencil. This creates a map for me to use so I can make sure I know where all the colors and details are supposed to go in relation to each other.
For painting, I use watercolors as requested. I like the paint pan cubes and watercolor pencils as preferred forms to work with. If you’re new to watercolors and want to try them out, I reccomend starting with pencils and painting straight from the “leads” and experiment with the balance between water and paint. (I’ll post a tutorial on how I use watercolors later.)
This bird has a lot of black feathers, but painting them only in black would make the bird seem flat and cartoonish, so instead, I paint the undertones of the feathers so those colors can shine through in select highlights – this gives the bird a 3D effect. I start the underpainting with olive greens and reddish browns. Green is the reflection of the sky and leaves of its surroundings, brown being the natural color of the feathers. The black paint will go on top in thin layers.
With the underpainting of the bird in, I moved onto underpainting some of the cherry blossom branch. I used white for the petals, lemon yellow for the leaf hichlights, pink for the flower buds, and a mix of ochre yellow and olive green for the leaf shadows. Later I added some pink to the flower petals to figure out how vibrant I wanted them to be.
The nice thing about starting the flower petals with white paint in watercolors is, it makes it a lot easier to blend and “erase” colors you put on top of it. if you make a mistake and get too deep a color on top of your underpainting, you can dab a little water on the offending color with a brush and lift it off with a careful pat of a paper towel. Hope this is helpful to anyone wanting to paint lightly colored flowers.
Thanks for reading the post this far! I appreciate you taking the time to follow along. I’ll be back soon with another update. See you then!