“GREAT BLUE”

At last I am finally painting! “Great Blue” (oil on canvas) has been a long time in the making. The piece below is the initial painting. I love the blues in that piece but I was more interested in achieving a more natural look. I’ve done few landscapes, and my mind gets blown by all the choices of shapes, greens, lights and darks etc. Which one should I pick?? Don’t believe it if anyone tells you that painting is easy…

For this piece, in order to make the white wing fade more into the background, I had to make leaves of a similar value, not necessarily color but value. The head was too large, and the beak too obvious. This might seem like simple matters, but frankly these are the decisions that make me want to eat ice cream.

I tucked more trees in to create more interest in the background, and bring more of the orange/pink color into the whole piece. I, also, wanted to created lost/found areas like under the curve of the left wing and again further down the wing. The dark areas force the light of the curve of the wing to come forward. The final painting, I hope, has a delicacy of movement that I don’t think was in the initial one. It’s that fluidity of movement that birds have that pulls me. I hope I’ve been successful.