In the first week of this month, I reached 1000 subscribers on my Youtube channel. 1000! I decided to have a giveaway for my subscribers to celebrate this milestone.
While we were still living in the hotel, I did a small experiment of wiping up leftover paint from my watercolour palette to a small piece of paper. This gave me a nice abstract background that I painted a small bird on. I really liked the result, and so that is what I decided to do for my giveaway. 10 small original watercolours, that did not take me that long to make. I do not know if you can really call them miniatures, but it is the smallest I have ever painted!
So last week I posted a video telling about the giveaway, and on Tuesday I announced the winners. I spent the whole week painting, and now I am in the process of preparing them to be sent off to their new homes. After that, I will dive straight into my next giveaway, because I have also reached 500 followers on Instagram! And that needs celebrating too! I'm planning to paint 5 more of these small birds and give them away on my Instagram account.
My knife and my cup matched, so I had to take a picture while I was preparing the edges of the watercolours.
Great-Crested Grebe. (reference from the 'paint my photo' website pmp-art.com) Here you can see how small they are. They are all either 8,5x8,5 or 9x9 cm.
Barn owl. (reference from the same place as above) I love how the abstract backgrounds start off by representing nothing in particular, but changes when you add the focal point to them.
Killdeer chicks. These were a lot of fun to paint. I mounted the paintings on a bigger envelope sized paper. (reference from the Facebook group 'photos for artists')
Common pheasant. This background was a little darker, so it needed a different kind of bird. (reference from Pixabay)
Pied Stilt and a White-faced Heron. These are both painted from my own reference material, and they are also both New Zealand birds.
European Robin and Iberian Yellow Wagtail. I really like the background behind the wagtail. (reference from Pixabay)
I think it adds something almost magical to the image if you leave some white space in the background. I have to remember this, because I usually tend to go a little too dark or add too much paint. The blue to the right is a Black-backed Gull. (my own reference, and an NZ bird)
Here they all are together. Which one is your favourite?