Hi! Your work is absolutely stunning. I was wondering if you have any tips for drawing birds (especially rendering... I keep getting lost in the Feather Rendering Sauce)
Thank you! As you can probably tell, I personally LOVE to get lost in the feather rendering sauce. But I can offer some suggestions on how I make my sick addiction work for me! Good paintings are all about contrast - whether it's colour, shape, light/dark value or detail. With a good camera you can get extremely detailed reference images, but applying that in a uniform way can leave your work feeling flat. It depends on your intent of course, but blurring edges, leaving some details out of focus, softening the parts you don't want your viewers to be interested in - these are all tools we can use to keep people's eyes moving and brains engaged.
An anon asked a while ago if I saw any mammals on my trail cameras, the answer is yes! Last winter and spring I was able to monitor a couple of badger sets. I love them???????
Grainy nocturnal recordings don't really lend themselves to being reference for detailed paintings but they are a good starting point for pen and ink.
Hey I love your paintings! I was wondering what your process is with references. Like do you just get one really good photo and work off that? Or is it inspired from more of a compilation?
Hello anon!
In some ways I feel like I started this project as a very long winded way of editing my very mediocre photos. Sometimes if the lighting and pose is really good I just work straight from one photograph but usually I'm working from a few taken either by me or my partner.
Here's an example of where the original ref definitely has a bird in it but it needs some extracting. The general pose is the same but I've had to look elsewhere to fill out the details that were in shadow or covered up.
🌙 the gliding moon ✨
a humbling painting (so much white, what a nightmare) that made me feel like I was beating my head against the wall for a long time. Got there in the end though!
This bird "project" I'm doing was intended to only be portraits of individual creatures I've seen and photographed. There is a barn owl I've caught glimpses of flying along the hedge line at dusk, but for some reason it's never paused for a photograph. I really wanted to paint one though, so I borrowed two taxidermied owls for a photoshoot. I didn't want them to go to waste so I made them available on my ko-fi for free*: https://ko-fi.com/s/2c94584ace
*tips appreciated but not required!