Bird Mania

Spring is in the air! It hit +15 degrees yesterday here in Edmonton and everyone was out in dresses, sandals and tank tops. We get really excited in Canada when the snow is gone. All the birds have come back home now and hearing them chirping about makes me even more excited for spring and the end of school (unfortunately I only seem to have the big jerks of birds in my neighbourhood like the magpies and crows, whom I could go without listening to fighting with the squirrels at 4 am). This means it is almost painting season! For me I only really paint in the spring and summer when school is out because I have more time to sit down and think about what I want to do and focus on painting the picture for hours at a time.

These are some pictures I painted last year and I can't wait to get back into it this year. All of these pictures I had to look at inspiration from other pictures to paint so this year I'm hoping to work on my creativity in painting and trying to discover more aspect ways of painting a picture on my own.

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Free Flow

After completing the flamingo painting, I got really excited about starting new projects. I wanted to try something a little less structured for these ones, so I just free painted without drawing in pencil first. I started with this hummingbird...apparently I have a thing for birds.

I then decided to try a jelly fish, which I thought would be so easy because it's basically just a blob with lines coming out of it but it was actually a little tricky! It was hard to get the colours to leak just the way I wanted but also to not have the tentacles leak too much.

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First Watercolour

When I was 7, I took a watercolour painting class. My mom was really into painting and wanted us to develop these skills as well. This past summer, I decided to try again. Luckily, I had most of the supplies from my mom.

I wasn’t sure what to start with but flamingo’s seemed easy so I decided to try them.

I started by finding pictures of flamingos online so I would have something to look at while sketching. I then remembered from my class that we would print off the pictures and draw a grid on it then draw a grid on my blank paper, to scale it, so we would know how big to draw each part of the picture.

I then went on to apply liquid mask to the areas that I wanted to be white.

Then I started experimenting with colours. I didn’t realize how hard this was. Trying to get the exact shade was extremely difficult, but then I realized you could keep layering all the difficult shades you came up with to try and enhance the photo.
The hardest part for me was the sky, the water and the sand. Trying to differentiate with colours and textures was extremely difficult for me and I still can’t say I am 100% pleased with it, but it will do for a first painting. To try and get the sand with a bit more texture I applied salt to the wet paint, which sucks the liquid out, but it wasn’t the correct texture for sand so I had to paint over it again.
To finish it off, I erased the liquid mask off, to reveal the white areas on the rocks and flamingo beaks.

I’m not going to lie and say I never got frustrated. There were many times when I had to take a time out from painting and do something else because nothing was working out how I wanted.

This was the finished painting.