I am back from a vacation, and I have just caught up things enough at home that I have time to sit down and paint. But before starting to paint, I had to experiment with paint colors, strokes, and color combinations to determine how best to paint the owl.
I began by coating a piece of cardboard with two layers of gesso. I drew a few rough feather shapes on it and started trying different colors and patterns for the feathers. I stopped to take a picture during this phase. I did more testing after that, but I wanted to make sure I snapped at least one picture of the tests. Sometimes I get too busy and work to the last minute and forget to take a picture.
I needed to experiment a little more on just how I wanted the feathers to look. I spent some time on the internet looking at images of owls. It was surprising just how individual the feathers of owls are. It made me feel better to think with that much individuation that I was not going to be doing it "wrong".
After I decided what color combinations I wanted to use, I started painting the owl on the underside of the feathers of the tail. That area is the least likely to be seen when the bird is standing upright. This gave me a little time to determine where the colors should be placed and how to create the striated pattern before it made it up to the more visible areas of the owl.
I settled on a mixture of 5 parts Burnt Sienna, 4 parts Raw Sienna, and two parts Titanium White for my color pallet for the brown portion of the feathers. The lighter part of the feathers is straight Titanium White. (I had originally tried a mixture of Raw Sienna and Titanium White, but it kept coming out more of a pink color than I cared to use.) It was important for me to have a formula as it will take quite a few days to paint the owl and I needed to be able to reproduce the color mixture over multiple days.
The next thing I had to consider was texture. I felt that if I just painted it flatly, it would not look as much like real feathers. I decided that even though I was using acrylics that I would use inexpensive oil and enamel paint brushes. I don't know where or how I ended up with these brushes. I think I may have purchased them by accident when I went to look for some cheap child watercolor brushes. I use them for applying glue sometimes. Anyway, here were these paintbrushes with stiff plastic bristles and they seemed just what I needed at the moment. I have been using these brushed to dab on the paint.
For each feather, I would tap the paintbrush into the brown mixture and tap on some of the paint in four uneven stripes across the feather. Then I would wipe out the brush and tap in some of the plain white on the rest of the figure. The white would mix a little bit with the brown in these areas to form a lighter brown color. Once all the paint had been tapped in on the feather, I would brush upward with a very light stroke. The stiff bristles would smear the paint and make it look less like distinct bands of color. Sometimes, if I had added too much white, I would go back and tap in a little more brown paint.
After a feather was painted, I used a small pick tool (think dental instrument) and scratched in a few lines. The lines helped give the feather the illusion of more texture. It also visually broke up the bands of color. All in all, I think it makes the feather look a little more dimensional.
I am actually a little further along than is shown in the picture above. This was my first stopping point. Since then, I have given the owl's feet a first coat of paint and completed two more rows of the feathers. Since each feather is treated individually, it takes a few minutes to paint each one.
I will be working on the underside of the bird this week. The challenge is going to come when I get to the smaller feathers of the head and legs. I will have to do a little more experimenting for those parts. The head is not the same color as the body. However, the paint will have to coordinate with what has previously been painted.
Check back next Tuesday to see the next update on this project.
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