Another Grebe and new backgrounds in the making.

Yesterday I finished my second Great Crested Grebe. They are a great subject to paint, I love the colours in their head feathers. The background is almost identical to my first Grebe, so they should look nice together. I think I want to paint more of these water birds. They belong to my summers out in the Finnish archipelago.

Great Crested Grebe. Acrylic, oil and collage on a 30x20cm canvas. Photo reference with kind permission from Andy Dodds. 

I have started on 2 bigger square canvases, and the goal is to paint some Herons. I do not know how I will get them home with me yet, but that will sort itself out in time. For the moment I am just playing with colours, and hopefully in a few days time I am ready to start with the birds. No collage this time,  just paint.

Closeup of the colours. I think this is the first time that I have ever used black in one of my paintings. I wanted some contrast, but not necessarily depth. Black is a very 'dull' colour, so I decided to try it out and experiment with it a little. The great thing with paint is that I can always cover it with another colour if I do not like it. But so far I think I do like it.

The background for heron nr 2. This one has already changed quite a bit from my original plan. That is how it develops sometimes...

Adding the last details to the Chickadee. I am still considering adding some flowers or leaves to get some colour, but I can not decide on what I want...

These two 25x25cm canvases has been fun to do. There are some really yummy textures going on. It will be a pair of Nuthatches sitting on the tree bark. I only need to add a little more colour to the trees and some accent's of blue in the background.

Finally I have my latest video to share with you! A page in my art journal, planning the heron paintings I showed you above. There you can see how simple I had actually planned the paintings to be, but for some reason it did not look as good on a big canvas, so thats how the experimentations started... =D I hope you will like it!