A Little Birdie Told Me …
Back to the art world.
Our starting lesson in this term of my water colour class was birds, specifically to understand how to do feathers. Tricky little things they are, too. Because water colour is a transparent medium, unlike oils and acrylics which are opaque and you can cover up mistakes, they require a bit more delicate handling. So how do you put lighter accents on top of colour? How do you paint that sparkle in the eye of your subject? The answer: gouache.
If you’ve ever wondered what that term meant when you were wandering through your favourite art gallery, it’s simple: opaque water colour. By mixing in or using directly white gouache, you can overpaint a colour and it’s covered. As it turns out, my lesson of the bird below didn’t require much gouache as I used thin washes or left white space such as on the bird’s belly. But I still needed to put in the eye sparkle and a few highlights on the beak and wings, as well as the tip of his tail and some around his head.
I think it worked well. Do you? (the light line near his feet is where I had to stitch together two scanned images because the whole picture is too big for my scanner)
