Sometimes a painting start to live its own life. The colours and the shapes once they are down on paper or canvas does not always appear as you thought they would. Something else emerges instead. Another idea, another painting altogether than you had planned. Has this ever happened to you?
Yesterday I started to plan a Robin painting, and everything was fine until I had painted the background on a small canvas. It did not turn out as I had hoped. The colours and shapes I thought I wanted ended up differently than I had imagined. I almost painted over the whole thing to start again, when the painting gave me another idea. I suddenly saw an Avocet standing there. So, today I started to search for reference images of Avocets. I did not find exactly what I wanted, but I did find a few very cute pipers and plovers. I decided to try out a couple of sand plovers. The background is maybe a tad too dark, but I can always adjust that once the plovers are closer to completion.
I enjoyed working with acrylics again. It was a while ago since I last played with them. Here is the stage while painting the background that I knew that it was not suitable for the Robin I had planned, and when the image of an Avocet pope up in my mind.
I changed to oil colours and blocked in the first layer of the plovers in oil. When I am done I want bigger contrast of dark and light on the birds, and with some added warmth so that you hopefully can see the sunlight on them. It might be that I have to tone down the background a bit, but let's see.
This is indeed an experiment, and I am not sure how it will develop. The canvas is a small one, only 20x20cm, and the reference images are from Pixabay.
Comments