Watercolor Birds

1. Quick Intro: I never would have thought that I would have created over 50 birds in a matter of months, added up 56. I did one bird ever before, no two. I showed a different bird per color and had a lot of fun with it. Before painting birds and still, my wheelhouses are lettering and faces and florals. When you think of the anatomy of a bird, it doesn't really go with any of those. To think and consider the different textures that are going on there, and how I'm going to represent that with just this paintbrush, is intimidating. I'm going to show you my process in creating these birds, how to go from start to end. I really want you to walk away from this class, feeling confident. I'm going to show you some tricks to paint a bird. It's a little personality, on two little eggs, and they each show vibrant color which we love to play with. It's a great subject matter to conquer. 2. What You'll Learn: Now, right of the bat, I want to lay out what you're going to watch on camera. I'm going to be painting these birds. Though I'm doing different kinds of birds with different body types to try to give you a variety of lessons, things to learn from, and for us to play, contrast and compare as we learn how to do these birds. At first thought, you think, "A bird." Yeah, I get it. But then you look at all the different kinds of birds are and their bodies are comprised differently. Of course there's some similarities, some differences. We're going to find that discovering and defining those proportions correctly are going to make all the difference when you are creating a bird on paper. 3. Bird Parts: But first, we're going to look at the overall anatomy of a bird and don't be scared. It's going to be very simple. You're going to watch how shapes interact. It's smaller, get's larger or indifferent, coordinating proportions. You'll see that there is a rhythm to the shape of these birds. Let's get the shape down. You've got the biggest boulder down. Now like I said, there's a lot of different ways we can portray birds because there's a lot of different kinds of birds. But I'm going to start with this standard looking small bird. Let's talk about the body parts, starting with the obvious, the beak and the legs. It's already looking like a bird. What do you know? Now I'm going to start from the top to the bottom. On the head, you've got the crown. Sometimes that'll be beautifully colored, then you have a lore, which is often times almost looks like a mask around the eyes. Then his eye usually has an eye ring. It's like our eyelids except it goes all around. Then it has an eye line, which it might have a shape around the bird, a cheek, and sometimes bonus, you get a mustache on a bird. Going on down to the bulk of the body, the breast, and finishing off this side of the bird, sometimes you get some feathers on the top, which is called the crest. Not all birds have this, it's going to the back. You've got the rump and you've got the flank. If you cook meat, you've heard these terms before. Obviously, birds often have a tail to help them balance when they fly and the back. Let's look at the wing. On the wing you have a wing bar and then the wing lining. Now the wing lining is where the feathers of the wing attached to. We're going to flip that wing open and you still have the winged lining and the feathers that attached to it. You have your primary feathers and your secondary feathers. Now, not all birds are in proportion to this bird. Let's explore those differences. 4. Bird Proportions: Let's go back to that first bird we were looking at and look at its proportions. We have the head, which is, I don't know, I would call it like a pencil eraser, I use very technical terms. Then compared to that, let's do the body size so that you can get a sense for the proportions. We have the body size, which is like a half circle, echoing the same shape as the wing. You can get a sense of how Charlie Harper did his birds in a very abstracted way, very minimalist way. Now, let's look at some other birds. Here is a pigeon, quite different, very small head, large body. Let's make some of these shapes so that you can get a sense for how these are put together if they were made into very simple jigsaw puzzle. See the large body, it has a huge chest, a long back, the wing is as long as the body is, and of course the tail is also large too. Let's go to a smaller bird. Notice how the head is almost rectangular versus the pigeon's very round head. Then of course you've got the body, which is a mango shape, and the tail is actually pretty pronounced on this one. What about the sparrow? The sparrow actually has a longer tail and a more rectangular head. These birds are really similar in size, but you can see the differences in the different shapes and proportions of their bodies. Even though they're both small birds that you would see in your backyard, the shapes that they make, make a huge impact on being able to recognize what kind of bird it is. This is when it gets interesting. A Godwit is a shore bird, but look at that neck, it's got this long neck, and it also curves, which I'm not going to represent right now, but it also curves and it has a very round head obviously, a long beak, a small body, just simply following these proportions, is really going to communicate what bird this is pretty quickly. Now, let's jump to a little deeper bird. This guy has pretty much no neck, and his head is very round, his body is very round, and looks really different from any of the other birds that we've seen so far when you see it silhouetted like this. I love to bump the contrast and make silhouettes when I'm overwhelmed, basically at looking at a subject matter. The cardinal is a classic, and of course we get to do this fun crest on the top of the head, which we haven't had so far. The body is also like a half circle, it's can part in the way that it stands, the tail is very angular, and also the beak, we get the kind of beak that doesn't jet out like a pointy nose, but rather jets from the top of the head or has more curvature on the top. I had to throw in the pelican, pretty different kind of bird. This very long horizontal body shape and neck connecting what's basically triangular head because the beak is so much a part of the head. Also notice that it has web feet, but it's also considered a bird. This is fun. We're going to do bird in motion, so, you'll get to see that. But the first thing I noticed is actually the beak, which is also not a pointy variety, but this time it actually dips down and it's pretty tall from where it connects to the head, and a parent actually has a large head compared to the rest of its body, maybe that's why we like it, we love actors with big heads. Finally, an owl, just because an owl is so very different, I wanted to show you the different proportions of an owl. Their body shapes are more like a rectangle with curved edges, then something with a lot of circles, and obviously has a lot of unique details, that looks creepy, so, I'm going to take that off. You can definitely get a sense for how different it looks from the rest of the birds. 5. Supplies: We're going to get into painting soon. But first, I want to let you know what you're going to need if you want to paint along with me. We're going to use watercolors as I usually do. I'm going to use Dr. Ph Martin's concentrated watercolors to do the base layers, where I really like to indulge in those bleeds. That was the basis for my birds challenge, and it's set the pace for how I paint birds in general. I'm also going to use my mission watercolor paints. They are two paints that I've scored it into this palette. It gives me a little more control when I'm doing the details, and if you would like to, you can use a pencil and I like to use a kneaded eraser. You can sketch out your bird and use a kneaded eraser so that you can erase as much as you need to or not, and leave behind a little trace to paint after. At times, I do add details with white eves and gel pens, and all of these supplies will be listed in the Your Project section of this class. 6. Textures Pt. 1: Before we get intimidated by large forms of the bird and depicting every last detail of it, we're going to explore a few techniques with our brush. I'm going to show you some tricks. Brushes I'd like to use are typically the round tip brushes. The point here they're at the tip, the better. This gives me more flexibility so I can actually do small details with the tip of the brush and chunkier details with the thickness, the width of that brush. I typically only use one, maybe even to three brushes for a bird and they'll just vary in size and I'll work from large to small, and work from wet consistency with the paints to a drier consistency with the paint so that there's more pigment basically. I'll get a variety of looks from just using these brushes. If you want to explore more about brushes, I have a class on that where I just encourage you to use different brushes to find different textures and different shapes that you can make with them. I'm going to play around with different feathered treatments. I'll use the width of the brush, press down and let up, and did this a lot with the pigeon for instance. All the techniques I'm showing you really rely on the quality of your brush. That said, I really use cheap brushes, but when the hairs on the tip start fragmenting off, like say this one, it's starting to get a little afraid, but nonetheless we're going to see what we can do with it. If it's no good anymore then we will chunk it because that's why I buy cheap brushes. Now if I want to get even pointier with my feather, then I'll make sure that the angle of my brush is shooting down so that I get that tip and then I press down and I lift up. Now, this is not a typical feather, most feathers land in this. Oftentimes to fill in an area, I will just use the body of my brush, swish it around, and then drop color into it, particularly if it is a wet medium. If I want a wet look, I'm going to use a more wet medium. Makes sense, right? This brush is a size 2, the last one I was using was size 8. Sometimes I will show the details within a feather, especially if the feather coloring changes because of that, or if you can actually see that the middle with, that bright white or darker color from the middle of the feather, They look like centipedes right now. But what I do is I make a line again, starting with the tip, get a little wider in the head up and with the very tip of the brush, fan from there. Now, if I were to say put down the hole with and just do this with the middle section of my brush, you can see how different it looks. I don't get a variety of line thickness if I don't use a variety of pressure when I push down my brush. Something else I noticed with birds is often in the neck, the feathers are stout and wider and that also affects how these feathers branch out. It'll be more of a circular shape as they scrunch up a little bit. If we want to bring a little more life into our paintings, we're going to let them be a little regular. You see how this feather and the lines don't quite connect there or these two sides aren't perfectly symmetrical. Those things add interest because your eye can't read this quickly and the longer that you can get your viewer to look at your piece, the better. 7. Textures Pt. 2: The eye is so important and I'll often spend an extra amount of time on it. I like to do wet on wet when I do the eye, and then I bring in this brush with a lot more paint loaded on it and get the outline and doesn't match like an eye because it requires a lot of layers. Right now I'm just exploring the brush. With this pointing brush, I'm going to do some similar strokes that I did with the larger brush, and you'll see how each one has a different flavor; each brush, even with the same movement and you see a different texture, different pattern emerging. I'm going to let my brush go dry so you can get a feel for how dry brush is also a fun texture to add to your birds. That's a pretty neat gradient, that you can imagine using our bird. A liner brush has along body. It doesn't let you have ultimate control over what you're doing, which is a lovely thing. With its long body, it holds the paint longer because it has more to absorb it. This is size 11, which is overkill for a small bird. But since it's fun to play with, I'm going to go ahead and do that; get a variety of textures. I already use this for an area of the bird that's maybe more fluffy. Within a bird, you'll have lots of different textures. The feathers on the neck, the feathers on the body, the feathers on the wings, the feathers on the belly. Those are all different textures. I'm going to try a wet on wet technique with the fan. I'm laying in water. Now I'm going to lay in color; and I'm going to lay in even a darker color. I'll have a natural looking gradient. Finally, I'm going to use this round. It's a four-point but it's not very round, if you notice the hair is cutoff, very flat at the tip. These shapes are going to end up being more rectangular, longer lines without a whole lot of curvature to the body. I'll do more rhythmic type shapes with it. Easy dabs of spots. Now if I had done this with the round brush, I would get more of a diamond shape, and these are more consistent. I'll save my tiniest brush for, let's say a reflection in the eye. We're going go back to that eye dipping into a white. That is getting actually pretty muddy. It's not very wet anymore. Then I can make this tiny little edits. Well, last brush I'm going show you is a Filbert. This is a half inch Filbert and it makes really natural, almost thumbprint like shapes. I'm going to deep in some color. It's pretty beautiful. I like using the side of it too. You can get a feel for how I use these different brushes for different parts to achieve different textures. 8. Bird References: Find references, put it together to make it easier for me when I sit down to paint. I paint boldly and then I paint very precisely. So first we're going to see how we find images. Honestly, I just go on Google or look through books nothing terribly special. What I do is I copy the image by right-clicking on the image. We will just use it as a reference. Make sure that your art is your own. I open Photoshop and I create a new document. I'm going to make it the exact size that I'm going to make my painting, which is just six inches by six inches. That way my reference is also a great reference for scale. I'll paste the image in and I like to remove the background at this point. With the marquee tool that's in the upper left just under the arrow. I'm going to take off chunks of the background that I don't need. There's some parts of the image that I can erase pretty quickly. I'm going to use the magic wand. The magic wand is going to select everything that's the same color and same value as what I select to have it a 40 contiguous, meaning that it's not going to pick up any other greens anywhere else. Just the pixels that butt up to each other and are together. That way I know that I'm going to select things that have nothing to do with the bird. Now, sometimes when you select, just like I did here, the white of the water bleed into the bird. So with my lasso tool, I will hit "Alt" if I want to remove a selection while I am clipping away, or I will hit "Shift "and also include that selection with what I'm doing. Basically I use the magic wand to quickly pick up a bunch of pixels. Then I use the polygon or lasso tool, which if you don't see it, just hit the lasso tool a little longer. It's probably on the free form lasso tool. I like to use the polygon because it means less clicking and add to your selection or removed from your Selection. Here's a spot that wasn't removed completely. So again, with that lasso tool, just hit the letter "L" to get the lasso tool. Select what you don't want and hit "Delete". Now, my loon is all on its own and it's much easier to use as a reference image. 9. Bird Sketch: We're not going to spend a long time sketching on birds, because it bowses down to then become cowards when it comes to painting. Just like I did with the second video, when showing you the different shapes, the proportions of the birds. I laid it out with just very simple shapes within the bird. Sometimes it's just a little visual exercise. I will trace right over the printout that I have my photo reference to incorporate those shapes, to just play around with what that actually looks like. I don't always start in the same place. I start with what gives me the best sense, an anchor for what every other shape is going to be laid on top of that shape. I started with those wings, that back where the two wings come together. In all honesty, I think it should have been wider, but I kept going and then I adjusted as I needed to. I saw that needed to get wider. So I added a little bit there. With my trusty kneaded eraser, just erase away. I'm not going to draw much more than this. I want to know where the head is. I want to know where the eye is because I want to avoid that area when I am painting. I just want to know the silhouette of it and the most important parts. I'll make adjustments as I need to. Making the head flatter, making the body wider, things like that. But I'm not going to do the details on the wings. It doesn't help me. I just do what I absolutely need to get going so that I can just keep going at it, keep rendering that bird even with the paint. Once I'm content with my sketch, I will do the unthinkable and erase it, but not completely. That is why I like the kneaded eraser and I you don't have to erase it completely. It just picks up the loose lead that's on the page. I'll quickly just debit or roll it around lightly so that I have still a sense for what I drew, especially if I just, I'm going to paint right away. Yet it's not going to show up in my painting because with watercolor, once you put water in paint over those pencil lines, they are not going to go away. 10. Steps: Base Layer: Now in this part of the session, this time I'm showing you a Robin. I'm going to really indulge in those wet on wet washes. I'm laying down a lot of water, and probably should have even chosen a larger brush, but I didn't want the color to bleed to areas that I didn't want it to be in. I'm just basically creating a color by number situation by adding in water just in the areas where I'm going to want this color to show through. This color is called sunset red, and I think it should have been called neon, red, orange because it looks so very bright. I'm looking at my photo, and I'm finding what are the parts that have the most color concentration, and I start from there when I'm dropping in the color, I don't arbitrarily place the color wherever there is that color, but rather where there is the greatest concentration of that color, and then as the paint bleeds into the water, I can navigate it around. Now I realize that this color needed some yellow to make it more authentic so I added a little yellow ocher. While it's wet, I would like to add in different colors to blend in with the existing one so that when they dry, they blend themselves and create these lovely bleeds. If I let it dry and then add in another color which I totally could do, it just wouldn't blend as well with the color to create a new color. It would just come up to it as a different shape of a different color. I'm going to continue this same treatment of wet on wet. You'll find that sometimes I alternate, and we'll do some details while my brush still has that paint on it. A little bit of a light detail here and there. But mostly I am just laying out the shapes, focusing on some of those color bleeds and getting some variety within the shapes that are within the bird that make up the bird to create some neat color blends where you really get a sense of what water color is all about. Now I want to show you how I do the eye. You got to make sure that the paint around the eye is dry. Then it's basically an outline and fill in. This is a really common practice with watercolors to have more control. 11. Steps: Mid Layer: First, we had fun with color blades and now we get to have fun with the tip of our brush. Getting slightly more color onto our brush while the paints are drying and this is where we start to see some personality pop out, which is always so fun. Now what if your bird is a very light color? Then I create very light washes and that means just a lot more water. I depend on the second layer, which we're going to talk about soon, to bring in some of the depth and texture that the first color layer just can't provide for now. Now that my layers are dry, I'm coming in with a tiger yellow color. Again, this bird, the colors are beautiful, but they're not totally accurate, so I want to get a little closer to that accuracy. I'm using the tip of my brush again for that second layer. I'm creating a different color, not by blending the colors while they're wet this time, but by overlapping them. You can see how there's a difference of texture. We're always looking to see how colors interact. If you look at that cheek, there's a warm part of his cheek that combines a little bit of that grayish blue and a little bit of that orange, and I'm trying to portray that and make it come across. Now whenever I paint a certain color on one spot, I look around and make sure that it doesn't also show up in another area. Sometimes with birds, they have a variety of colors in different areas of their feathers. But a lot of times you see hints of the same colors throughout creating this uniformed color scheme. Let's go back to the gold finch that was a grayish white color. Now it is that critical time when I'm making this look a lot less like a blob of a slightly off-white. Again, I'm using the very tip of my brush. I'm looking at the length of some of those feathers so that I can show some differentiation, how in the neck they're very short and tufted, and how they get elongated and more elegant towards the back of the wings. 12. Steps: Details: Sometimes I shake my hand off just a little bit and then I pick up my brush again to create different marks. So these lines are a lot more structured and horizontal then the fluid lines I was doing before it can helps me to give myself a refresher. I'm going to come back to the eye, I will be constantly touching the eye when I am doing a piece. I want that eye to be perfect and sometimes I do overwork it in and obsess over it. Fortunately for this guy it turned out okay. But I want to show you how now I add some white ink to my watercolor palette and mix it in with whether it be a fluid watercolor or a tube paint. I find that the tube ones are better because they're thicker. I'll add kind of these colors that watercolor just can't do on its own. So it's these tiny reflections, it's these very subtle pastels. Of course, you'd think water color paints would be great with pastels because they can do very light colors. But I don't like my paintings feeling too eerie or maybe not have as much of a presence and want the light color, but I want some boldness among with it. That's why I've resorted to adding just a little bit of white. I've used several different kinds. Again, it's listed on the materials sheet. I'm giving, giving you three different white ink brands and a quick review on what I think of each one and how I use each one. The final stretch here as I jump over after doing some of these branches and adding in just a very dark color. So I'm using a sepia mixed with a little bit of indigo. I as much as I can, I avoid using straight black and probably going to go back to that eye because it's not quite defined enough. It's not looking alive to me than blotting out a little bit of paint that I felt was too light and putting in a darker shade to make it really stand out. Sometimes black makes the bird. So I have done so many so you can see how I did some of those blades. I did that second layer. I'm going to go ahead and put in this dark beak because it helps me identify where this bird is, where it's going. Sometimes you have to go bold, even if it's out of step with the process of light to dark, just so that you can orient yourself on where this is at and how it will actually look like the bird that you're looking at in your photo reference. 13. Advanced: Rainbow Bird: All right, maybe you get it. Maybe it's all making sense to you, but you want to learn some more advanced techniques. This dove was so much fun, it's called an emerald dove. It has a rainbow effect. So this requires some flexibility, some extra ability in being able to handle wet on wet medium. I'm laying down water as I have before. I'm laying in some color and little by little, I'm going to add more colors. The trick to a rainbow effect is to maintain your piece wet without it being so wet, that you have puddles of water mushing into each other and then creating a muddy color. My advice is actually to start on a more dry side, when it comes to how much water you put on your page, and then adding more water if you need to. Here is where I start to do that rainbow effect. I have a few dabs of this light purple, and then I wash my brush, I dip into a yellow and do some dabs of that. Now these are all wet. I watched my brush, I use the green and then I just let them sit with each other. Make sure your brush is clean, in between each one of those colors, so that you keep the integrity of that color. The beauty is that you can always add more color, while your page is still wet. Right now I have a nice gradient, and I'm coming in with darker colors. I'm dipping my brush into very saturated colors because I feel little more like a have a gauge. I understand how much water is on the page and how much it's going to bleed for me and how much it want. Then these colors blend for you, if you don't have too much water or too little water. This is something that is fairly difficult for me to teach over video. But basically, you want to see that glycerin on the paper, but you don't want to see a puddle. If you see a puddle, you want it to be contained. Let's say on the breast of this pigeon, I have that orange. I know that there's a puddle there, but I know it's not going to go any far, because it's butting up to a dry area in the page. 14. Advanced: In Flight: One of the coolest things about birds is that they fly. Let's do a bird in flight. It might seem a little intimidating to see all those feathers fan out and to try to do them justice. I will say though, that this is the trickiest part, the sketching. I'm going to look for those big shapes and trying to get a sense of their proportions. This wing looks larger. Looks like the top half of a banana. Then it fans out here, not much of a body here. Then a lot of feather there, making a diamond effect. This is not a perfect drawing. But I'm going to go with it because I will get too focused on every little detail when I want the feeling of this bird to be loose. It's really up to how good your final painting is and not how much you stuck to the reference picture. Again, I'm focusing on minds. Let's think of this like a coloring book. Since we're dealing with watercolor, what's going to happen is we're going to add color that butts up to that color and they will bleed beautifully. What I'm going to do is I'm basically doing one brushstroke of feather so that I still have that curvature of the feather. The fun part of dropping in the Irish blue as the under painting. This is peacock blue and this is what on what so I don't have very high expectations for how this color is going to a crisp in those lines. It's a neat effect, right? Now, you noticed I stopped with the wet on wet because here I have a lot more white going on. I'm using this blue because I can go over it with the dark, like already getting a sense for how beautiful this bird is. But I'm going to add it with the turquoise blue because it's a lot truer to the color of this bird. All that is white. Now I will go back to start sepia. With this darker color, it's just too dark. I'm going to water down my brush so that I can fade it nicely. Now I'm moving into what's that middle layer of darker colors still with my larger brush before I head into details. Going to my trusty Number 2. I'm going to work on that eye. When I'm at this point where It's looking blobby, but I like how it looks. I'll start working on the eye. I used a touch of yellow and now that I've accrued a little bit of confidence, I'm going to go back to that eye. Do the ring around the eye, make sure that that yellow is dry. It's got a nice little reflection on the top of the eye there. This number two brush is so helpful in creating these details. All those little finishing touches, the things that people notice usually are done at the end of the painting. Painting birds in flight seems a little intimidating, but really it's the same process as long as you've got the sketch and take the extra step of creating an under painting. 15. Bonus: Overlapping Feathers: Hey guys, so real quick, I want to answer a question that was asked through one of the projects that was posted. Because of that it was valid and you guys would probably find it helpful to know how to do feathers when you are overlapping. In a lot of the ways that we handled feathers through the body of the bird is wet and wet, and then we added details at the end. When you've got different groupings of feathers and you want to have them overlap, that doesn't work as well. Because maybe this bottom row of feathers is one color and the top is another, and you don't want them to blend. Here's my bird, as you can tell, I dressed to match with him. Here in the wings you can see that there is this layering going on and we don't want these colors to blend. Real quickly, I'm going to sketch my bird. Now for overlapping wings actually go from the bottom up, but I've used this one in the Christmas watercolor Wonderland class, royal crafters, choice, and it's in the list of supplies. Now this time I'm going to use these hydrous paints, but I like that these colors are so very primary as are these and that's why I chose to go with these instead of the radiant ones just have so much variety in colors that it would take me forever to decide. It's nice to have these basic, just straight on primaries. I'm going to start with this section with a greenish blue. With every brush stroke I'm trying to already depict the shape of the feather. I'm still working a little wet on wet, but that's because I'm treating this part as a chunk. I'm going to skip the next one while this dries. I have this chunk and then it goes into a lighter green and then it goes into this dark blue, yellow, green, yellow. Since I have blue on my brush let me to go ahead and use that. The point I really want to get across when working this way when you're doing overlapping, is that it's like a puzzle. You see how this looks like a puzzle piece that goes right up to the next yellow. Now while this is drying then I'm going to move up to this little puzzle piece of all yellow, trying to work right up to the edge, but I know I don't want to get too close. I really don't want these colors to bleed. What this is, is this area right here, this yellow then blends into the green and the green is pretty light, so I am going to use a lot of water to mix in green and I don't want to touch the edges of the top shape and just being very careful to not touch that top yellow. Hopefully you're already getting to see how we have these feathers on top of each other. Actually goes more like this, bottom to the top and this is just the base layer. This is actually the most critical part when it comes to doing these type of feathers, and from this point the second and third layers are pretty similar. We're adding in detail, we're adding in shadows. I'll let you see it at a rapid speed here, so I don't sound too redundant. But again, with overlapping shapes, this is how you want do it instead of doing more of a bottom wet blend. You have the separation of those bright colors, those feathers that are going over each other and they don't blend into each other. 16. Ready to Fly: They can be funny, they can be sweet, they can be elegant. They show freedom, they show love. There's just so many ways you can use a bird in your work. I hope you enjoyed this class and that you maybe already took out a sheet of paper and started to sketch your birds, started to think about what birds you might want to do, started to Google some images. I know that if you are determined, you will do it. I'm looking forward to having a project page full of different birds from all of you. If you need more inspiration, feel free to purchase my book. It'll have very many of them. Lastly, you better do that soon. Thank you for watching, and I thank you for reviewing, for liking, for sharing. I can't wait to see your colored birds. Please don't use my hashtag, because it's my hashtag.