31 Days of Watercolor Birds

I think I'm a bird nerd!

A good friend sent me a link to a 31-day challenge called #birdtober that has been on Instagram since 2019. This is my 1st year and I chose the international edition.

You know I love birds so I decided to challenge myself using watercolors. I have a lot of watercolors I hardly use and this seemed like a great way to put them to use. I would like to share what I learned.

Paper:

It was a tough decision to choose cold press or hot press paper but I ended up using Clairefontaine's Aquapad 5.8 x 8.3” (A5) 140lb cold press paper. One day I painted on the wrong side which was smoother and I noticed right away. In the past I've only used smooth hot press paper so this was a nice discovery to learn that I like the grainy paper. Don't get me wrong, smooth is great and I have way more control but I wanted to move out of my comfort zone.

Working with small images:

In the past I would always print a large version of a bird so I would get the dimensions exactly right. Or, I displayed the bird on a larger tablet. But this time I worked off my cell phone. This was a challenge in itself! Smaller birds seem to be easier to sketch than the larger ones and I'm not sure why. The proportions of a large bird seem crammed on a small piece of paper.

Selecting the perfect reference photo involved finding a pose that I found appealing and more expressive, plus the image needed to be fairly clear so I could zoom in on the eyes and feet to get a better look. Painting bird feet is awkward!

To layer or not:

It took 31 days for my my brush strokes to loosen up. Working in watercolors usually requires working in layers, building the colors up. But I mainly work with acrylic paints and this is completely different! I'm too impatient to wait for watercolor to dry so I try to do everything in one layer. That didn't always work for some of the birds. For some I used a base layer plus a feather layer, like the tree sparrow and chimney swift.

Water challenges:

I tried working with wet paint on dry paper, and wet on wet paper. I'm still not sure how to choose what areas to use both techniques. I really like the wet on wet. The paint dries really fast so I had to work quickly. I would select a certain area and work there. But it sure was tricky! I did use a heat gun because of my impatience. I didn't want to spend all day doing the birds.

How long did it take?

From start to finish anywhere from 1.5 to 2 hours. That includes finding the bird reference, taking several screenshots, sketching the bird, mixing the colors, then finally getting to paint the bird!

It could take 20 minutes to mix up the proper colors. This happened mostly for blue colors. One can never have enough Blues on their palette because it's a primary and cannot be mixed. The most helpful tool I have is a color swatch I made many years ago from my first watercolor set. It must have taken 16 hrs to paint, but it is such a valuable tool even when I'm working in acrylic paints. Some of the more difficult color mixes (Little Sparrowhawk) I wrote down on the back of the picture for future use.

Color separation mystery:

Everything was going well except for one bird that I tried to paint by mixing up a couple of colors. I mixed up 2 non-granulating colors cerulean blue and cadmium red, plus 2 granulating colors bloodstone and amethyst. I used a watery light wash and instead of seeing gray, the colors separated into blue and red and I didn't like it. I asked an artist who uses watercolors exclusively and I think the conclusion is that the binders in the student-grade paint mixing with granulating artist-grade paint was the problem. Also a watery wash of color will give it more of a chance to separate. If your curious which bird, it's the Chimney Swift.

Do I paint the eye first or last?

Well I sketch it in pretty dark, and then I would paint the whole bird and do it last.

I think the hardest part of working with watercolor is getting the water to pigment ratio figured out. It will get better with experience, knowing my paints and knowing how the paper reacts. I used a new paper which means there are so many variables at play!

My favorites are the Chestnut Bunting, House Crow, and Costa's Hummingbird.

My least favorite is the Australian Pelican, but not the bird, the blue water behind it!

Here's a quick slideshow of all 31 birds.

I'd love to know your favorite ones in the comments below.