Wren - #2

[Enug]

Some oil brush but mainly Ink Pen. Background gradient and an overlay.

[damasocl]

Great painting...
I love background manage...
Congratulations!

[Saphire]

Enug this amazing, I love the setting for the wren and that background is perfect.

[Rachelle]

Enug

I like that golden glow you've achieved here. I didn't imagine that the Ink Pen could do this texture and softness, it's such a real looking bird.

[Enug]

damasoci - thank you, I used tree bark texture overlaid on a gradient.

Comment very much appreciated Christine - I think your fur texture is amazing.

Rachelle, - lots of layers and strokes, as you can see by the s/shot. I used a dry brush for some of the larger feathers but the ink pen for fine feathers and detailing of feathers.

[Caesar]

I dunno how You manage to have cats and birds aside, but this is another best-seller! I presume Your avatar gobbled it just after You finished it ... LOL

[D Akey]

Nice one! I like the inside of the beak. The worms are not so hot on it though. But I like it.

For what it's worth, in my humble opinion the orange to the left is a bit too powerful for this poor muted bird. It pulls the eye away from the subject. I can see why you put it in though because it livens it up and it would be really plain without that there. But it's not strategically working for you. If you were to introduce color, you would have to pick something that wouldn't kill cock robin, but it would draw the focus to the bird cleverly and perhaps with some more finesse compared with the rest of the canvas.

[Enug]

Dear Caesar- I make sure to keep them apart.

Mr.Akey - comment re distracting background taken on board. Is this better?

[D Akey]

Well, yes and no. You have several things to balance. Your solution got rid of the orange dominating the left side of the painting, but it tossed out the excitement of color and contrast. It suffered some from the lack of spice in that it's not so dynamic as you have it. And the painting of the bird and that thing it's sitting on don't have a lot of relationship with the background now. And that's something to consider. It looks like it's floating. It's not so integrated.

It's certainly clearer and the eye goes to the bird. So if that's what you want to say, then you've said it. However there's an in between area in which you can still jazz up the picture, only you have to control where and how much. Where do you suppose that might be and how much? That's the issue you as the artist are ever faced with until you establish the area of familiar tried and true ground based on what you're out to accomplish.

In the earlier piece of the two here, my guess would be that you were experimenting somewhat and set out to paint the bird in a feathery way and were focused on that technique over the picture as a whole. Isolating bits and bobs for experiment and study is well enough, but it might serve you to be also considering the overall look all the time. You're in no rush to a deadline, so it might be a good thing to always provide yourself context so that when you have to translate that to a painting, it's not a foreign notion.

You'll always be thinking as a picture maker this way, and that's what you want to be I assume. And I'm suggesting you might want to also be taking the picture as a whole into consideration at the outset. I understand you're kinda new to painting. But you might as well own this part of it right away and be learning where to put your spice and how much.

Consider what are the tools available to you?
Color, value, character of the mark, what might be in the background naturally that you could employ, etc. And then you could consider what is the relationship between your subject and the background?

Think relationships. A common problem for painters is it's easy to make a lackluster painting by not making your contrast strong enough. And that comes from painting on white or light value. Anything you put against white is going to look super dark. But the danger is to work everything out and find there's no contrast because of all the middle range colors that come later. Believe me it's a shock when I've come to the end of a painting only to find it lacked contrast. It happens, and usually when we're either inexperienced or haven't painted in a while.

Therein lie some of the considerations you may want to hold as you develop your pictures. It's also something you probably want to consider ahead of time so that you know how far to push the star of the painting in order that it can have those things happening. Forest for the trees kind of thing. Comes with experience, and unless you fall back on a known commodity using things you already know work, it's always a bit of a guess.

I'm not going to necessarily go farther with you on this one because I've said enough to keep you for a while. But a suggestion would be to look at some wildlife vignettes, pictures of birds that strike you as what you would want to do. It's a very nice technique you're doing, only I suggest adding some spice to your cooking.

Go Enug!!!!!!

[Enug]

As usual dear DA, wise words and a lot to digest. The bird is supposed to be perched on a bullrush so I suppose there should have been more vegetation to indicate this.