Wings Over Winecountry, Colleen's place (2 Viewers)

Do you pencil first ?
Im intimidated by watercolors...
The #138 Gull/Waterfall work looks almost like oil.
Very, very nice. The land/water contrast with the touch
of bright auburn is great !

I've only been using watercolors the last month or so, so I'm still really new, I just looked at Tim's work a lot to tried to figure it out, and then the only thing is just to paint a lot with it, I prefer it loose ,but some artists do very detailed work , I don't know how they control it that way. It pretty much does what it wants to right now.

Yes the Gull work is oil, 11x14 it's actually not a waterfall, but the surge between big rocks out at a very wild place called Bodgea Headlands, where the waves can come from serveral thousand miles away, so the surf is mostly pretty rough and often very big...the places where it surges between the rocks is very active with currents and eddies, maybe too active in this work, I think it's a bit distracting, on the other hand this is just what it looks like.

Does anyone miss the big guys out on walkabout this week? Cant' wait to see what they bring back.

Yep, Its very quiet at the mo......But when they get back, itll be like opening the flood gates..............

to answer beachbirder, sometimes I just paint, if I do use pencil it's only the very sketchy marks for outline, which I tend to ignore if the brush does something else. On white birds I need it so I can see where the form is as I paint up to that area, and leave the "white" blank.

We'll have a feast when they get back Andrew:t:

more black turnstones, which according to my reading only live along the west coast, and most breed in only one place in Alaska, making them very vulnerable. For some reason I think I see a bit of Nick's influence in these, not intentional, but when you study a master they do tend to get into your work

Turnstones are great, saw on for the first time last weekend......didnt realise the size till then..
And yes, I greatly admire the sketches of one Master Tim....his ability to throw somthing onto a page and make it look beter with a little colour is my 'light and inspiration at the end of my tunnel'...If I can achieve a smidge of what he does in his sketchpad, Ill fade away a happy person

Another very nice sketch of the Turnstones!

Just back from hol and having a browse. Great Turnstones- really true to the moment. Interesting discussion on telescope too- that Jonsson has written at length about how to him the scope is waaay more than a visual aid and transports him (his words) to where the bird is. You could almost imagine some of his portraits in a round frame.

I'm about to start a new oil, probably the last one I can do before a little show of my work locally. I have both white and brown pelicans where I live. A group of whites fish at Shollenberger, and a group at Bodega Bay. Some browns mingle with the whites at Bodega, most I see flying at the Head.

Except for one lucky day, they are quite a distance, so my scope has helped. Here are some prep sketches for the painting. Only way I can figure out a white bird is to darken the background....still trying the watercolor thing.

I've been thinking about this painting a long time, but was not ready to tackle the challenges it presents until now. It will be a high key work, and pretty loosely painted without a lot of detail.

I spent about 4 hours working out the composition, as when I put the pelicans together, the bills are so strong one has to be very aware of how those lines are going to create rhythm and movement. I've used birds from several sketches. I painted with gouache to rough in the birds, which let me keep rewetting an changing tones and values. where it got too thick I scrubbed it back. This is painted over an old pastel that did not work, I use Ampersand pastelbord, which has a tooth made of marble dust on a hard panel, so I washed off the loose stuff, you can see the warm undertones that stained the surface, but it will work with this just fine.

After this I went back out to Bodega and just spent time observing them, with a few sketches, but mostly just looked trying to catch the jizz. You can see I have one in a very strange position, I like these weird poses, but don't always pull them off well, but here I like that element of irregular shape among all the expected nearly iconic shapes. The light is mostly my invention from a memory of other whites I saw at Shollenberger, and a day at the bay when the light was flat and thin fog where the sun could just get through.

On the second one I have the whole thing roughed in, you can kind of see where I'm going with a bit of reflection......I'm going to put some clove oil in my paints( this keeps oil wet and loose for a long time, so I can work wet into wet as long as I like) and try to do this all at one pass to keep it loose and free, which is why I did the watercolors first and roughed in the birds, by now I kind of have a feel for the shapes and forms, I've drawn that one preening 4 times now, one with some detail, so I could figure out how it was working, but I won't put detail in. Biggest challenge is to get the values working to create light when I won't have a lot of dark to play it off of. The darkest dark except for the touches of black feather is a midrange grey.

The color rendition is only so so here, and there is shine on the second one due to wet paint. I'll try to do a daylight shot tomorrow if I can.

Im impressed........looks good from where Im sat

Yes - this is a lesson in processes and the development is very good indeed. Super choice of poses - really well observed.

You know as I looked at your preparatory sketches I couldn't visualize how you would make them into a painting. I'm not sure why I had this reaction. Maybe they just seemed like individual birds and I didn't see how they would connect.

Well now I know! I see that you had a good plan all along. The painting is off to a great start and I look forward to seeing it progress.

I started with my painting plan first, and that's what took 4 hours to work out, I did a lot in photoshop which is where I do a lot of my compositional sketching now. Then I drew it out in paint using the gouache and finally started the oil. Between the photoshop and the beginning of the lay out I took time out to work in watercolor on each individual bird so I would be familiar with the forms and values before I began the oil painting.

I do not find, for me anyway, the watercolors translate to oils, but because they force me to think in different ways about form and color, they help me prepare well and the oils go faster and better for what I learn in the sketches. In a way I make the mistakes in the watercolor so I don't make them on the painting. On the paintings I make new ones

colleenc said:

In a way I make the mistakes in the watercolor so I don't make them on the painting. On the paintings I make new ones

Click to expand...

The new mistakes are always with us...

Well one advantage of new mistakes is more creativity, I just think it's useful to make the obvious ones first.

Here is a better shot of the lay in and I decided to do an small 5x7 oil of the preening one, as it is going to be a challenge to make it read right. The small single bird is about 2x the size of the one in the painting so I could put in more detail than will be possible, but it will help as I know what the form is to supposed to do.

"What lays down stays down" is a phrase sometimes used for plein aire work. something like that is my goal here. The whole purpose of all the prelilm work is to make it possible to describe the forms with just brush strokes with no reworking. Keeping it alla prima or all at once, wish me luck I'm starting it now.

No luck required - but all the best with it. These studies are fabulous.

Best of luck, though as Tim says you won't need it. And thanks for the writing on your process. It's been interesting to watch and read about.

this is going slower than I planned, I decided not to add the clove oil so the paint is thicker and drier, so I'm ending up using it more like a pastel, stroke by stroke. The good news is the end result is still close to what I envisioned.

Here are the 3 on the left, basically they are done. I've been playing with the warm cool tones, letting some of the warm sand reflect up on the bird. I've made them whiter than they really are, really they are a more buff tone, but to the eye in the distance they appear white white, so I went with that impression.

OK close to finished now...the bird on the far right will get a bit more detail when it sets up. Just a few tweaks away now.....
I plan to fix the legs of the far right, get the jizz just a bit better, missing something, and lower values slightly in the reflections...

Any comments welcome, if anyone is here, seems very quiet in the comment section...:cat:

would love suggestions for a title....

colleenc said:

OK close to finished now...the bird on the far right will get a bit more detail when it sets up. Just a few tweaks away now.....
I plan to fix the legs of the far right, get the jizz just a bit better, missing something, and lower values slightly in the reflections...

Any comments welcome, if anyone is here, seems very quiet in the comment section...:cat:

would love suggestions for a title....

Click to expand...

Looking good. You know I was a little bit worried after looking at the last partially painted photo, and that's why I didn't comment. I wasn't sure why so I went back and looked at the first photos you showed. It was the water with the very white reflections that was in the early version. I was afraid that it was missing in the version with just the three pelicans. But now I see that is back and was just due to how you cropped the photo.

I know this will sound pretty formal, but after years of abstract painting I'm afraid you can't get the formalist out of me! I really think the white reflections in the water at bottom of the painting add a lot. They help to take it from a good accurate portrayal of pelicans to a good painting of pelicans.

As I said, looking good!