Great White Heron

This outline comes from Terry Madden's Wonderful World of Watercolor: 1200 series, Volume 2, which I bought used... and, like last time, I've ignored his instructions on painting the picture... instead I did my own thing with Heron and Dragonfly (his name for the picture).

I used Derwent Inktense water-soluable colored pencils to complete the picture on a standard medium-weight drawing paper.  Until I went to do the background, I hadn't intended to use any water... but then I determined that I couldn't get the effects I wanted with dry pencils, so this background was painted over with clear water after the pencils had been applied. I also used a colorless blender on the foliage and reeds and parts of the dragonflies and the heron, which brightened some of my colors.

Finished Wren

Here's the finished bird... I think I enjoy the drawing more than painting... not sure yet though.  The painting was finished in February, 2009. It was shown in March for one week, and in a different location in April for less than one week... during it's showing in April, this painting sold for $65.00 framed, less than two months after it was finished.

For The Birds

This bird might be a little difficult to see. Some of my lines aren't as dark as others... but that's okay at this stage, since it's an in-progress scan of a sketch I plan to paint. As usual, I've drawn a subject from drawspace.com. Lesson J07 is about using a grid to establish proportions in your drawing - which is what I attempted to do here; only I liked the little bird in the lesson so much I wanted to draw him... so I did the best I could...

In my search for a wren with similar markings, I ran across this blog with a photo of an absolutely perfect specimen of a male Superb Blue Fairy Wren.  Curious as to what the female looks like, I took a look at some of the other entries on the same blog. I knew she wouldn't be as colorful, but thought she might still make interesting sketch material.