Sunbird

This is a painting that I did during the December holidays for my sister-in-law. She wanted something to remind her of home (she no longer lives in SA)… I thought about this one for awhile and decided that something like Table Mountain would be way too clichéd; so then I thought of going for something like a pincushion protea. However, while searching for reference material I came across this beautiful photo of a sunbird (that my mom had kept from a calendar – gotta love my mom, she keeps everything); I figured there’s some protea-like plants in the pic so it would do nicely… and I like sunbirds

 It took a couple of weeks if I remember correctly. I first did a basic sketch on the canvas with my beloved 2B pencil; well kind of basic: I have a tendency to go into too much detail with my preliminary sketches – and then cringe when I paint over most of it with the first layer of paint. I used my trusty oil paints thinned with a bit of turps here and there in the background. Speaking of the background – it went through quite an evolutionary process, starting out as a post impressionist looking mass of leaf like blotches. It really wasn’t working because it looked too flat and didn’t allow the bird to stand out enough; so I employed my artistic lisence and went with a radial gradient (which, if you use your imagination, could be the sun’s light filtering through a lot of foliage); this makes the bird stand out more and actually draws the eye to it.

 Please feel free to comment…