Technique Explained

Thanks everyone for the encouraging remarks! It's all texture, mostly from an inexpensive China bristle brush and Utrecht professional grade gesso. A multilayer technique was used. Black gesso was used to rough in the birds which was corrected with gobs of white gesso followed by a transparent glaze which was then hit with a pot scrubber to expose the little ridges, etc., etc. This detail is about an inch wide. For maybe the third time I applied white to the bird with finger tip, tinted with yellow this time. Once dry I glazed the whole thing blue again and wiped it off the bird with a paper towel. My goal was to avoid any hard edges, suggestion only with a tonalist feel. The dark spots are painting knife on the high points. Almost forgot. This was painted over an earlier painting also with a lot of texture.

A painting is a series of corrected mistakes...might as well get started.